* FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY *

In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through nights reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylightwith its escapements and unbreakable numbers, restless, / irregular light and shadow, awakenedcant appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedoma new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and cant be saidthe poems give way to Hamiltons mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: the asphalt velvety in the rain.

The central suite of poems vibrates with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness, with care unbounded by time or space. Its impossible charge is to acknowledge and ease suffering with a gaz