“Raab brings a darker timbre to poetry’s comfortable middle register; his eminently approachable, low-key lines are never quite as affable as they seem, and the book is all the better for that.”— David Orr, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, “The Best Poetry Books of 2015”

“In his eighth full-length collection, Raab (The History of Forgetting), a teacher of literature and writing at Williams College, exhibits tight lyricism and a characteristically American wit in meditations on mortality and intimacy. ‘All that I am keeps me silent,’ he opens the book’s meditative opener, before moving in the next poem to thoughts of murdering a coworker: ‘Let’s say you feel someone is better off/ dead, but you don’t do anything about it.’ Such wild swings in tone and subject matter are common throughout, as are Raab’s occasional, but piercing, socio-political insights (‘sometimes the rich appear// to ask for my trust. Believe us, they whisper./ What you can’t have you don’t need./ What you were never given you can never lose’), his scientific revelations (‘Maybe nothing’s only itself when we’re looking’), and aphorisms (‘Too much thinking is worse// than too much action, except for Proust./ And many other equally persuasive exceptions’). What binds this collection is neither the formal qualities of the poems, nor Raab’s unmistakable voice, but his ability to move across registers with consistency and well-tempered feeling: ‘Swallows dash through the twilight/ and I don’t think about/ what they might mean,’ he writes, ‘Or I didn’t// just then. They swooped in and were gone.”— Publishers Weekly

“Raab, a regularly anthologized poet with more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including What We Don’t Know about Each Other(1993), a finalist for the National Book Award, continues to present his colloquial brand of prose poems with precise lyrical conversation in his latest book. These poems offer powerful evocations of the most human of themes: loneliness, the haunting resolution of doubt, love’s many shades, and a deeply intelligent form of comfort amid the messiness of emotions. Always, reason balances high sentiment and dramatic outbursts. Raab’s is a wholly American voice that reveals itself in sardonic humor and reflection as the poet addresses universal, philosophical quandaries; heaven and hell; and everything in between: ‘Is there anything you want to know ? / my father once asked me. / I can’t picture the scene. Were we out on the lawn? / Was a baseball involved? No, I said, / taken by surprise. And he turned away, / embarrassed and relieved.’ A wonderful, mature, sweeping collection”— Mark Eleveld, Booklist