Cliff Dwellers

Cleanly divided in two parts--one that looks out at our appalling political world, the other that looks in to contemplate the troubled mind and heart--Harry Newman's Cliff Dwellers asks, Can these things, in truth, be taken apart? For years, the masters of war, our neighbors, our friends, and our own self-interest have conspired to tell us to look away from the atrocities committed in our names all over the world--from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq to Gaza to the streets of our cities. All the time, daily, we are accompanied and haunted by the shifting and unseizable shadow of what we know and feel. Harry Newman's poems observe this human predicament with fury, grace, and love. There are no excuses in these poems, and there is no looking away.—Edwin Frank