The imagery in these poems is strikingly vivid, and equal weight is given to the small moments, like hearing howling coyotes while pumping gas, and the more epic pieces, like the visitations of a mysterious figure who takes the form of a bull. Our speaker here is on a voyage, an exploration of self, and we are along for the ride, privy to his dreams, his fears, and his innermost thoughts—many of which may feel familiar in their humanity.

The repeated refrain of “Where does the time go?” in “Untitled (Unmothered),” for example, is a question we all ask—casually, wearily, in terror. Here, however, the phrase appears in pieces, shifting in and out of the rest of the poem’s other lines, which attempt to answer that question, an answer that doesn’t satisfy but that the speaker knows he cannot change.

Where does the time go? I repeat aloud.
 It moves like timber on skids, slides down
Where does the time
 a hill to an unnamed river, dimmed by distance.

The central theme of this poem (and many of the pieces here) could feel abstract or unoriginal, but in Burrell’s deft hands there is something new to see in subjects of age-old contemplation. Concepts like time, aging, and grief have been covered by countless writers and poets, but here they feel fresh and strike the reader anew, as though experiencing and learning about them for the first time. The right words—and there are many of them in this collection—open the eyes to the universality of these themes, as well as how they can hit each of us in a unique way, cutting to the bone.

Many of these poems face down a world that isn’t what the speaker wants it to be, whether personally or broadly. Even when the narrative touches on modern events, like gun violence in “In a World Gone Mad,” the language never feels familiar or preachy. Instead, it transfers the sense of haunting from speaker to reader, forces us to share in his horror and feelings of impotent frustration: “It’s not clear / how any of us live and let / it happen again and again.”

That’s not to say that there is no sense of play and joy in these poems. Far from it. “The Sharknapper,” for example, finds depth and warmth in a rather silly news headline about the theft of a shark from an aquarium, and the speaker relates both to the thief and the shark in their strange needs:

Or I’m the shark, taken from my tide pool
exhibit, hustled to a pickup truck
and sped on roads to the breath of blue water.

This feeling of celebration, of enchantment with life, plays out in even some of the heavier subject matter in these poems. In “Bottom of the Water,” the speaker sits alone in a motel room, and even as he writes a sorrowful song (“The water drowns me in a language / you could never understand”), even as he watches people treat the world unkindly, he thinks of someone he loves.

He doesn’t care that I’ve seen him, gives
me a little wave hello. The woman
he’s with giggles, round the back of the car—
their red kiss drowned by haze of exhaust and taillights.

All this, and I can’t help but think of you.

Perhaps, many of these poems suggest, the good moments, the rays of golden light we can grasp, are worth holding on to, are what makes us human in the best way. Even the subtle noise of the highway during a silent drive becomes a thing of beauty, a song in its own right.

Images reappear throughout the collection, like the refrains of a song, tying all the poems together. Something as simple as a toy Speak & Spell, for instance, becomes a symbol of childhood and its fleeting nature, a reminder of a more innocent time, as well as what the speaker has lost since those days. Its presence reminds the speaker how very close those memories and moments are. Close enough, it seems at times, to touch.

Take the poem, “Midlife,” where the speaker faces the passage of time and his own mortality, with lines shifting between his present (“I stare at the ceiling from beneath my bathwater”) and his past (“I sail past the Huffy’s handlebars onto a gravel road”). The resulting piece is one where time feels flat, where every moment is just a blink away, each as significant as any other.

This makes it kick you harder, she says, and ashes
into my Bud Light. I’m fifteen again,

The speaker meets numerous versions of himself—child, teenager, adult—but eventually he must choose to let go of the past, to honor what has been by no longer dwelling in it: “I drop the blade onto the riverbank. / The armada of me floats away in a blur.” Poem by poem, this collection forms a journey of self-discovery, as the speaker uncovers pieces of himself, his life, and what it means to face down whatever years remain.