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In his seventh poetry collection, Alan Michael Parker aims to surprise. Recombining lists, fables, and mathematical equations, Long Division is formally playful, wielding irony as a lever of political resistance. Here is a writer fascinated by comedy, by sadness, and by the unexpected ways that poetry makes both possible at once. When was the last time you laughed out loud reading poems? Parker’s new work is truly funny, exposing the impossibility of realism in a world where imagination is more trustworthy than experience.

Alan Michael Parker’s latest collection, The Age of Discovery, is a work of enduring beauty, filled with his signature tenderness and surprise. Parker’s interests range from the Psalms to the Internet, from a woman stepping out her window to die to two men trying to learn how to live as they argue in a row-boat. With an eye on some of the greatest love poets (Amichai, Mistral, Neruda), Parker delivers a collection deep in empathy, rigorously attentive, and formally inventive.

Whether about the moon or hotel sex, politics or poppy seeds, Alan Michael Parker’s poems are always tender and eccentric and nuanced. In his eighth collection, with metaphysical fortitude the poet continues to deliberate—in all sorts of poems, some unpunctuated, some in prose, and some the first-person lyrics well loved by his longtime readers—upon what our daily lives mean. And how do we sing and praise and grieve all at once?