Each Thing Touches, Marc Frazier’s eclectic new book, is enhanced by unsettling persona poems, like “Maiden” and  “Premonition,” and savvy poems about learning and growing up that are apt and keen-eyed rather than doctored and nostalgic (“Classroom whispers: the fetus found by Rowl Road pond, / the open caskets of powdered aunts, / the dark confessional with its one red eye, / the crush of debt on our parents’ heads”). Another strength of this large-hearted book that insists on the primacy of hands, the power and efficacy of the tactile, is how ably the poet journeys beyond his cogently-rendered Midwestern roots, to consider, on a wide scale, the wounded and the dispossessed, to encompass catastrophes of the magnitude of Hiroshima and the Titanic. Frazier’s poems are often rich with striking and dynamic questions (“What mad king has torn out his eyes this time?”), and the result is often refreshingly human, urgent, and disarming.”

Frazier illumines the darkest corners of memory, bearing apt witness to remembered experience with uncommon clarity and sureness, each poem a gem cut and polished to a fierce brightness. He revisits childhood again and again through a true poet’s lens, seamlessly fusing his narrative and lyrical gifts. In poem after poem, he insists on uncovering the radiance buried beneath the questions.