Departures: A Collection of Poems

Whitman would love this book as much as I do. The big people walk through it-Katharine Hepburn, Sylvia Plath, Enrico Fermi, Mother Teresa-but so do the little ones. There's a cousin who was killed in World War II because he hadn't noticed that he'd wandered into enemy territory, for example, and a maiden-lady piano teacher whom a young speaker spies when he gets up the nerve to stick his head in the neighborhood tavern and sees her perched on a barstool, "a wingless angel / pinned to her frayed cloth coat." Departures is as strong as coffee, as real as sin. It's the whole package and more.
-David Kirby

Because "no one knows water / like a drowning man," Kolin, who understands, gives us a raft to cling to: a calendar of life, from youth, first love, the darkening of October, November, loss, death, to the comforting knowledge of "God calling us back to paradise." Interspersed, the sins of our times-racism, Katrina, the Holocaust-but always the transformative power of love. Who could forget the widow who turns "an obituary / Into a love letter"?
-Alice Friman