Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink is populated by strange characters--Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin--all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and--of course--joy.

Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation,
before me appeared Benjamin Franklin,
who magnetized his French paramours
at dinner parties as an amusing...