Mary Ellen Branan returns again and again to test what stands between us, never quite giving up on what might connect us. These poems are touching and well-traveled in the least facile sense of these terms. They cherish contact as well as the possibility of genuine sympathy, proving the tender spot between the self and the other, either human or animal.
These poems venture out to various points in the United States and Poland, not as a tourists appropriation of exotic places and creatures, but as the fragile words of a person in search of intimate communion, a bond made more precious by...