SCIENCE AND by Diane Furtney is a moving, insightful, funny and exuberant collection of poems; sometimes the reader feels like an assistant at bold experiments in a wildly colored lab. Unusual discoveries in nine sciences turn into deeply imagined metaphors and tropes in five sections: Science and Family, Science and Romance, Science and the Homo Sapiens Young, Science and Irritation, Science and the Surround. A dramatic nonmetrical couplet form presses the data into trenchant narrative lyrics of love, loss, and growth, as well as a couple of cautionary parables. The poems arrive convincingly...

Each of Diane Furtney's lyrical narratives in The Blue Man: Poems of the Ordinary shows us some odd or unnoticed aspect of what seems at first commonplace. That aspect might be provocative, reassuring, whimsical, alarming, delightful. The poems notice, among other things, the typical but disguised agendas in marriage, an unexpected limitation resulting from psychosis, the uniquely huge outlook of an impoverished poet in North Beach, a possible etiology of loss of belief in God, the way in which serious illness can become ordinary even as it reveals more offbeat qualities in the world, the...