This eye-catching title turns out to be an apt name for a book of poems that are not similar in style or form, yet form a cohesive and satisfying contemplation on love and life. Each poem in the collection captures a moment, a feeling, and preserves it with words that are fresh, unexpected, and perfect. Mark Yakich is bursting with talent, and this book richly deserves its selection for the National Poetry Series.

Some of Yakich’s poems are sparse, needing only a few words to pierce through to the marrow of experience. Others feel more dense, like there is more to say than can be managed by the medium of poetry. Yet either way it is the sharpness of the words that touches you, the images Yakich uses to capture love in its wonder and its horror, like these in “Two-Pack Solitaire: “Like a perfectly potholed surface / We are / Or a cup of wine / Crushed.” The book is full of pairings and twosomes, be they fathers and daughters or lovers, and this duality finds expression in pleasing couplets like “Two foreign idioms / in a crowded train,” from “How They Existed in the World.” In this way these poems chronicle the ebb and flow of romance, capturing the twin demons of desire and regret, as well as hope and disappointment.

The unrelated individuals conjured up by the title inhabit the poems in these pages, yet underneath their apparent dissimilarities, they all share in the struggle to find meaning in love and life. Mark Yakich is not providing answers, but his poems give clarity to the questions and beauty to the wondering.