Why the Gods Don't Get It

In Bill Christophersen's Why the Gods Don't Get It, the gods may not get it, but the poet sure does. He knows that suffering-of a people, a neighborhood, or a heart-is hard to detect from the distant view where a "four-car pile-up looks like tumbling dice" or a tenement going up in flames seems to be "blossoming." And so he moves in close, with startling powers of observation, illuminating everything from the honed violence of nature and humans to the astonishments of love-a lover "delirious as a gyroscope," a widower "tenderized" by grief. With their exquisitely tuned music, lively wit, and formal brilliance, Christophersen's poems do what they promise, opening doorways for us to know the world and ourselves up close, as humans need to.

-Lynn Powell, author of Season of the Second Thought

In Bill Christophersen's knockout new collection of poems, someone is screaming at "a gloved hand/ work[ing] a chisel under the window sash." The problem of evil is dramatized by a series of reluctant confessions: the neighbor who survived Bergen-Belsen, the mugged artist, the woman raped in her apartment. "Step back. / Turn down the sound. Pain / grows painless...," Christophersen cautions in language both colloquial and lyrical. Here is a poet who, like Dostoyevsky, insists that truth bought at the price of suffering is not worth the cost.

-Marcus Cafaga, author of All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season