Shaped by the poet’s long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse

Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents indelibly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, “the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations” (citation for The Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award). Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: “When I think of ‘possible worlds,’ I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds.”

In the light of day

perhaps all of this

will make sense.

But have we come this far,

come this close to death,

just to make sense?