<p> The capacity of the rediscovered world to signal and illuminate, restore and repair, fuels the poems in <i>Every Shameless Ray</i>. In <i>Every Shameless Ray</i>, it’s more often possible to find one’s way when headed somewhere else. Intellectually curious, emotionally acute and playful in form, these poems rely upon the unreliable — the accidents and reversals that expose prescriptive narratives of war and patterns of desire. In poems about a child’s misunderstood words and the shock of a Matisse painting, habits of perception are interrupted and disrupted. Liminal spaces open up — in the movements of a to-be-lover’s hands as he eases out the under-row of slick black papaya seeds, or when a tipped-over kayaker rides a river’s current upside-down. The heart may ache, grave illness threaten, war rage and art tear down its foundations, but a shameless calling, a fine disorder persistently reveals new realities. In a time of social and political disruption, these poems explore and engage personal, social, and political realms intimately, contemplatively, and in protest.</p>