As poet and essayist Mary Ruefle has asked, "Which is more inexpressible, the beautiful or the terrifying?" And as Wallace Stevens reminds us, "Death is the mother of beauty." Kathleen Dale's work has been compared to that of Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Bishop. In this, her fourth collection of poetry, Dale explores the connections between beauty and the deaths -- big and small -- that are always taking place around us. She "unnames" beauty in order to see it afresh in its many guises: her connection to the conflicted history of her home state, Kansas; the sudden death of her beloved sister at...