Otherwise Elsewhere: Poems

David Rivard’s new collection describes the many powers—psychological and historical—that flow through people’s lives in acts of faith, greed, pleasure, celebrity, gossip, and consolation. A teenage boy looking at a weathered gravestone wonders how many times he’ll sign his name in his life; the forest on the move in Macbeth intersects with a blind man cured by Christ; a man coming out of a terrible dream of being lost is saved by touching his wife’s hair. “For those of us who need it,” one poem asserts, “instruction is everywhere.”

Rivard’s poetry is full of unsettling humor and the careening movement of memory and imagination.