Poetry. These are poems of unyielding, good-of-heart sensibility, but always at the edge of where the world is hanging on. The words that tell these lives gather themselves at the far reaches of the experiences they reveal, and the speaker is often the unelected rudder in a world that otherwise could--and does--turn so easily upside down. 'Maybe love is just being very polite, ' asserts the self-effacing narrator. These poems and this narrator quietly show that it is much more, but that we must indeed work at it heroically every moment. These poems help us to understand why.--Alberto Rios