Gondola

“It might feel like something’s broken. No. / It’s time itself,” writes Jeff Latosik in his elegiac and compelling fourth collection of poems. Filled with profound portraits of family, lost friends, and near-strangers, Gondola probes memory’s many distances “[t]o bring the world out of its dream” and to renew its consoling truths. A game of hide-and-seek, a loved one living with dementia, a newly installed stairlift, a bevy of swans, a concrete pipe in a field—all become opportunities to explore the pull and prophecy of the past through Latosik’s remarkable attention. “So it finds me raking, piling, opening a door. / Peering at my car window” he writes about time’s relentless momentum, “thinking my reflection looks / more and more like it needs me.”