Luminous and feral, DEER HOUR is part creation documentary of the worlds we build for ourselves with language, part elegy for the fact that it is impossible to generate closure without enclosure. In a world where humanity is bound to "red cedars whose secrets keep us logging" as well as "childhood / writing from the front lines," Xiong would guide us through the anxieties of being "bound in sore action, / unable to reconcile / the wild & the not-wild" with poetry that is determined to witness while resistant to the complicities of history. Here, as in other crucial, contemporary poetics, the...