Daniel Tobin’s fifth book, Belated Heavens, spans from prehistory to modern Manhattan, Neanderthals “cowering in caves” to a man snoring in Penn Station as if he’s “swallowed an espresso machine.” Tobin delves into timeless themes of violence, destruction and endurance, his poems running the gamut from form to free verse as they offer the reader an underlying hope, a tentative belief, that, yes, we are surviving—somehow, thank heavens. An award-winning Irish American poet and scholar, Daniel Tobin’s assorted iconographic choices will hook every reader, whether by poems about environmental consciousness, murdered heretics, meal bugs or the caves of Lascaux. Throughout the writing is an ever-present violence that at times is as quiet and slow as “an endless tongue of water licking seams / where stone foundation meets concrete floor,” while other times is as brute and in your face as a “village idiot’s shredded legs.” Violence, however, is not the main concern of this collection, but rather how humanity thrives despite the volatility of the world.

Recent recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and widely anthologized, DANIEL TOBIN is Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.