Filled with precise observation of the interior and exterior world, as well as lashings of wit, Smith’s wide-ranging, often poignant lyrics take us on tour through history, ideas, people and places. He is the perfect travel companion in a sortie of the century and its cultural outputs—as well as its detritus, cast-offs, conflict and ephemera. This perfectly weighted collection offers us pleasure, wisdom and redress.

Unanimous Night is the second full-length collection from Tokyo-based poet Michael Brennan. Unanimous Night is an affirming elegy, a love song in recognition of an elsewhere that constantly evolves within and beyond the contemporary world—its horrors and hatreds, its fragility, uncertain truths and knowing—an elsewhere of moments and presence, of love and communion, where language and being, the living and the dead, the natural and the technological, the instant and endless converge, where longing turns through healing to the intimacy of experience, to the ever-arriving present. Unanimous Night is an approach to the space where language and experience coalesce, where subjectivity gives way to experiences of love, mourning and desire, where being offers itself to the violence and grace of another, to an intimacy where being is being shared.