Late-Stage Everything

Aaron Anstett's new collection has the qualities we expect from this distinctive American poet: a just imprecise enough ("exactish") sense of beauty, a polished, often comic, wit, and, just beneath the crystalline surface, deep wells of unflinching and darkly rational sorrow. New here, though, is a fragility that may also be, strangely, a kind of "late-stage" freedom: a radically fractured incompleteness, tremblingly grasping towards what can no longer be held: "It was often all we could do."