The poems in this book inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. In this collection of sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous poems, a lost man wanders among the towns of people who can't remember what they named the children, how to find each other's porches, or whether their buildings are still intact. That's why they need the person with the loupe. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world's harvest is whatever swims too close, the person with the loupe steadfastly verifies only what can be measured, while the lost man is witness to the unquantifiable and the limitless. And throughout, precise and observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous, precarious wilderness of The Declarable Future.

Finalist, Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards

Jennifer Boyden’s first book, The Mouths of Grazing Things, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 2010. Her work has appeared in Folio, Orion, Gettysburg Review, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. She is a recipient of a PEN Northwest Wilderness Writing Residency and lives on the Oregon coast.