“Cuz Rich” (we discovered a distant cousinship probably through marriage a number of years ago) quotes William Carlos Williams-- “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem”--to end his opening essay. I couldn’t agree more in regard to this fine collection. Perceptive is an understatement—perhaps capacious better captures Rich’s ability to fully see the world and its inhabitants, and then, as word-crafter send the world to us full bore as poetry. He touches so much, deftly and deeply. In “Suicide Rates”, an ekphrastic poem, he transforms a colorful graph of suicide rates into “yellow foothills in the foreground for black women,/ taller green slopes for their white sisters,/… In the distance,/sharp blue peaks of white men tower over/the landscape, majestic as the Tetons at twilight,” (p. 19). In “Lazy Birder” the speaker confesses to rising late but “not caring if I miss a few warblers/ flying home for summer”, and remembers that he also was a lazy med-student who “hated to see sunrise/before surgery rounds, didn’t choose/ to stay awake all night to learn/ the differential diagnosis for belly pain./ But I was never lazy with my love/ for patients and their stories,/ the way they appeared at the ER/ without warning, like the pair/ of cedar waxwings in my apple trees” (p.11). In “Dandelions”, one of a number of poems about his daughter or his wife (both are physicians), the speaker watches a daughter bow, “like a ballerina/ at curtain call to pick a dandelion/ gone to seed, a gray sphere /the color of my winter beard./ And with one breath/ brief as twenty years, she sends/ a thousand possibilities into the wind,/ the empty stalk in her hand/ bleeding milk from the broken end,/ the head shaped like a perfect star”(p.72).