[close] Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forché's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forché attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future. [close]