Great Regulars: And it's this, more than anything

else [Jena] Osman achieves in Public Figures--and she achieves quite a lot--that demands from us not only our sight and attention but also our resolve to see better.

Too often poets encounter war (or any form of ritualized violence) as though it were either a rotten banana to be held at arm's length or a fluffy puppy to be played with rambunctiously and irresponsibly. Osman forces encounters that are substantially more courageous, leading us by the nose from memorial to memorial and implicitly asking, "Why did we put this here? What does it mean? What were we thinking?" These are questions that richly deserve answers, asked in a collection of poetry that richly deserves to be read.

from Seth Abramson: The Huffington Post: October 2012 Contemporary Poetry Reviews

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