Astatine is an Italian girl, who like Dante's Beatrice, haunts the narrator of Michael Kenyon's incandescent fourth book of poetry. Named after a radioactive element whose isotopes endure half-lives of mere seconds, she is simultaneously a disappearing and abiding presence who cajoles and comforts, who questions and points, who often leaves the poet puzzled, electrified, heart-broken, and wanting more. Astatine is Kenyon's meditation on the evanescent and persevering tragedy of our lives on Earth. He takes us on an inspirational journey through time that embraces all we are born to and must too soon let go of, even as we make peace with the ever-changing fortunes of existence, even as we come upon unexpected joy.

A young couple escapes Vancouver and takes a meandering trip down to Panama. In a dreamlike tale, ambiguous in setting and period, a girl child is lost. And Charles Darwin, whose historical namesake found his life work's inspiration in South America, finds his purpose in studying village life. Through two novellas bridged by a story, Michael Kenyon reads the imperatives of biological diversity into inner human life and asks: what happens when we do not accept parts of ourselves? what happens when genre and classification engulf "freedom" and spirit? New storytelling requires acknowledgment of the implicit paradoxes of the unconscious, journeys as much into the psyche as into the world. Kenyon's people often find outer form in their lives through inner exploration and vice versa. This book is full of expressions of escape and commitment, knowledge and acts, introversion and extroversion, feminine and masculine.

This is Michael Kenyon's third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection or circumstance to the fringes of middle class life. Here, it is insight itself that pushes the speakers closer to the edge. The world of these poems is dark: Kenyon names and owns our clear cuts, our overpopulation, our fossil-fueled rush to oblivion, the violence embedded in sexuality. This is a book of expanded elegy, clear-eyed, unflinching amid the wreckage of its loves. Fiercely elegiac, jaggedly sexual, The Last House stands on the brink of devastation-personal, ancestral, cultural. There is transcendence here, but no redemption: it is too late. But this is also a book about love-protean, violent, perduring-love as the key to reality, even as it mystifies us or tears us apart. These are poems of deep and disturbing vision, sustained by electrifying honesty.