“I feared AIDS,” Kennedy’s speaker declares bluntly in the opening poem, “and Cindy feared / being alone, so we forged a compromise” (“The Pact”). The speaker fulfills his role of heterosexual husband to Cindy quasi-dutifully, killing “dozens, then hundreds” of beetles to maintain his “aggressively healthy” roses and grilling brats in the backyard (“Beetle Graveyard”). But the actual orientation of his desire is clear—he covertly meets up with his gardener at an airport hotel (“Sheraton by the Airport”) and grows erect as he watches a man in a public restroom “piss[ing] loud, full throttle, a mist / of drops against his legs” (“Oasis”). Kennedy moves deftly from Cindy’s salt-craving pregnancy (“Having It”) to the speaker’s own childhood, a time of profound confusion and disorientation. His father is killed by a drunk driver (“Accident, 1982”), leaving him with a brother and a violent, alcoholic mother who sexually abuses him (“Small Bother”). Cruelty and discipline characterize the speaker’s turbulent childhood; he overhears his friend being beaten after the two watch MTV (“Turning the Key”) and receives a black eye from his classmates, which his mother ignores (“Open Secret”). Returning to his adult life, the speaker finds a lover, Randy, and comes out to his mother, who responds with skepticism and denial (“Out | comes”). Kennedy’s clear, novelistic narration is broken up by two poems titled “Mouth of Many Endings”; these are fragmented, abstracted interjections in which “a mother marks the water’s anger / the child failures into length.”

Kennedy is at his strongest in passages of acute, glistening physical description. Images jut out at the reader, hyper-saturated with the intensity of childhood memory—a father’s amputated little toe, a “dangling comma” that is “purple // in a frosty jar”; a mother’s backyard “burn barrel” in which a “donut caramelizes / into a small fist.” These objects, defamiliarized yet recognizable in Kennedy’s quasi-prosaic language, stand in for everything that is unsaid and unsayable in the speaker’s life, the sublimated strangeness that cannot be named: “Every house a house / of sin,” the speaker and his mother observe, “besides our own” (“Until We Saw Our Faces”). The speaker’s tenderness for his mother is profoundly expressed in poems like “Snapshot of a Girl Refusing to Smile, 1956,” where he pities her hardscrabble North Carolina childhood and her loneliness, even as he points out that he “never wanted to be her son.” One or two poems hit duller, more expected beats, particularly in the framing poems that provide an entry point for the denser, weirder childhood material. The scenario of the rendezvous with the gardener feels well worn, for instance, and “No Leaks,” a poem about a suicide attempt, is glancing and vague. (“At the hospital, I learned to paint butterflies. / I watched the anorexics pick at their meals.”) The collection is at its most piercing when it operates as a dreamlike scatterplot of childhood omens.

Lindsey Norris Sullivan must fight to keep the library open in her Connecticut town of Briar Creek on the shore of Long Island Sound. Her nemesis, Gideon Trask, is an obnoxious town councilman who wants to get rid of the library to lower taxes. So Lindsey and her staff come up with the idea of a book boat to serve the population of the nearby islands, creating more interest in the library. Lindsey’s husband, Mike “Sully” Sullivan, is just the one to help—he’s a boat captain. Needing a patron to fund the book boat, Lindsey enlists the services of her friend Robbie Vine, a famous actor. He sets up a meeting with the membership committee of The Club, an exclusive country club on nearby King’s Island, which is desperate to have him join. Dressing Lindsey in the designer clothes he buys for his girlfriend, Chief of Police Emma Plewicki, Robbie brings her to meet Mallory Masterson, Leslie Stone, Tina Baldwin, and Harper Winslow, who agree to help fund the boat. On its first run, the boat stops at Split Island, home of the Capshaws and Montgomerys, whose long-standing feud has been supercharged by the elopement of artist Ariel Montgomery’s son and Gwen Capshaw’s daughter. On a second trip, Lindsey and Sully find Gwen stabbed to death with a palette knife. Of course Ariel’s a suspect, but Lindsey doesn’t believe she did it, and when they find Club member Leslie Stone killed the same way, it looks like Ariel’s being framed. Lindsey thinks the answer lurks within The Club and, with Robbie’s help, uncovers plenty of motives.

There are any number of reasons why people prefer pat formulas—get tough on offenders, keep an eye out for broken windows—over science when addressing crime. Science is hard. Yet nonscientific outcomes are, as social scientists say, suboptimal. In the vein of Freakonomics, Doleac turns to scientific method to test a number hypotheses, arguing, “I…see a lack of rigor as unethical.” As any economist might do, she weighs reward versus punishment as incentives for behavior. One insight is that, yes, there are plenty of people who belong in prison, having committed violent crimes such as rape and murder. But a related insight is that most people who enter the justice system are “more sad than scary,” perpetrators of misdemeanor offenses such as shoplifting and drug use. Given that most crime, by Doleac’s account, is not well thought out in advance and that much crime goes unpunished, there are remedies such as building a vast, national database of DNA—which, she maintains, has a greater deterrent effect than the threat of imprisonment, since DNA evidence can help improve the likelihood of identifying those who commit a crime quickly and thus act as a strong disincentive. (For privacy advocates, she notes that such a database is accessible only to law enforcement.) “This intervention breaks the incarceration cycle rather than perpetuating it,” Doleac argues. Perhaps counterintuitively, she also advocates for lighter sentences for nonviolent crimes, given experimental results that show that leniency “reduced the likelihood of showing up in court again with new charges by 53 percent, and it reduced the number of future charges by 60 percent.” Other remedies are more counterintuitive still, such as providing air filters in school classrooms, which “have a meaningful effect on pollution exposure, in a way that has big real-world benefits”—including reducing crime.

As a baby, the protagonist is embraced by her grandmother (“her petals wrap around me and keep me safe”), who “teaches her to be strong like the branches of an ancient cedar tree.” As she learns to talk, her grandfather (“like an ocean”) teaches her to be “courageous like a thunderous waterfall.” As she learns to walk, her mother (“like a valley”) shows her how to be “gentle like a warm spring day” and instills in her an appreciation for the hills (“your relatives”) and the Earth (“our mother”). And when she begins to run, her father (“like the sun”) teaches her to “dream big and shine like a brilliant rainbow.” As they sing to her, the family emphasizes that her connection brings with it a duty to serve as a place keeper, a guardian of the Earth. Littlebird (Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) weaves together multiple themes; this is simultaneously a story of intergenerational bonds, a tale of growing up and building self-confidence, and an appreciation of our planet and its resources. Relying on daring colors that resemble those seen in nature and in powwow regalia, Littlebird’s sweeping illustrations pair with invigorating text; soaring butterflies, birds, and bees crisscross the pages, uniting the girl with the land.

Finley Minor has always considered himself a boring sort, aside from the fact that he’s had accurate premonitions of the future since he was a child. He’s mostly learned to ignore them, except for the ones that help him as a market analyst. While undergoing hypnotherapy after being dumped by his long-time girlfriend, he has a vision unlike anything he’s ever experienced; he’s not just seeing the future, he’s in it, inhabiting the body of Wallace Deng Moroz in the year 2131, searching for an artifact (a crucifix called the ikona) that’s supposed to lead everyone to Shambhala. (“If we find it, we can lead humankind to a new world, of perfect health, longevity.”) Finley isn’t the only one searching for the ikona: In Hong Kong, Jia Li wants the artifact to heal her mother, who’s been poisoned; in Atlanta, Kate Davies unwittingly ends up with the crucifix after a client leaves his coat in her home. As the pieces, and people, start coming together, Kate realizes that everything’s tied to an old science fiction novel her mother was obsessed with. Words from her past (from the author himself) start haunting her again: “Don’t forget Shambhala, my dear Katya.” In this time-twisting, centuries-spanning yarn, Dixon delivers an engaging narrative of searching for utopia. Though the story hops around in time, from the 1930s to the present to 2131 and back again, the plot is easy to follow. Each character feels unique, even with the clear connections and similarities between them, making them easy to distinguish despite their shared goals or intentionally obscured pasts. Threads of religion, mysticism, meditation, and past lives are woven throughout the narrative, giving this story a soul-touching, deep vibe. The text contains a link for readers who want to explore the themes and novel further.