Spilled and Gone

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists." At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the