The focus of Baron Wormser’s poetry over more than three decades has been the human drama of our trying to shape what is misshapen. In this, his tenth collection, he takes on a dizzying range of subjects from Diane Arbus to playground basketball to the fall of the Berlin Wall to Prospero to a suicide inquest. In all his poems, he pursues the complex gist that will at once betray and reveal the welter of feeling that informs a moment, a scene, or a life. For readers of poetry this book is the culmination of well over three decades of poetry writing, a book into which much experience of life and poetry has gone. It’s brought to light through the formal features of odes and villanelles.

The focus of Baron Wormser’s poetry over more than three decades has been the human drama of our trying to shape what is misshapen. In this, his tenth collection, he takes on a dizzying range of subjects from Diane Arbus to playground basketball to the fall of the Berlin Wall to Prospero to a suicide inquest. In all his poems, he pursues the complex gist that will at once betray and reveal the welter of feeling that informs a moment, a scene, or a life. For readers of poetry this book is the culmination of well over three decades of poetry writing, a book into which much experience of life and poetry has gone. It’s brought to light through the formal features of odes and villanelles.

The focus of Baron Wormser’s poetry over more than three decades has been the human drama of our trying to shape what is misshapen. In this, his tenth collection, he takes on a dizzying range of subjects from Diane Arbus to playground basketball to the fall of the Berlin Wall to Prospero to a suicide inquest. In all his poems, he pursues the complex gist that will at once betray and reveal the welter of feeling that informs a moment, a scene, or a life. For readers of poetry this book is the culmination of well over three decades of poetry writing, a book into which much experience of life and poetry has gone. It’s brought to light through the formal features of odes and villanelles.