Book excerpt: A moment like this becomes extraordinary,/when I think of how easily/it could have been overlooked; claims Kristin Laurel in her poem Ordinary Bliss. How lucky we are that Laurel refuses, over and over, to overlook the ordinary. This is a truly wonderful collection of poems that looks unflinchingly at the full spectrum of human pain and trauma, at the violence we do to ourselves and each other, and at the violence that the world inflicts on each and every one of us. What I admire above all is their tenderness and their hard-won humor: here is a poet who has seen as mother, lover, ER nurse and survivor the best and the worst we have to offer. To steal a phrase from Yeats, here is the world in all its terrible beauty. Here is a world of cut lilacs and metal, of broken minds and bodies, of bullets and vomit and “unhindered sky.” These are poems that resist easy redemption or absolution. Instead, they present the complex reality of what it means to be human, and they implore and challenge us, in their refusal to turn away, to stay human and to live with compassion. -- Jude Nutter, author of I Wish I Had A Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman and The Curator of Silence.