Touching Other Worlds

The great strength of Chris Rainey's poetry rests on its lucid directness. The surprising range of subjects it engages, the various ways it exposes them, offer blissfully little ambiguity-though he leaves the world more richly mysterious for us than he finds it. The book is dedicated to the man who left a parcel of land, on the Palisades near the Hudson river in new Jersey, to be used as a public park. That resource has served the poet well; his work is one with it.