Children With Enemies

In his fourth book of poems, Stuart Dischell is part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist; or, as one critic puts it, “a lovely, encompassing mirror of our little but to us so urgent human life.” Dischell is a poet who writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience, and the poems here are by turns socially outward and inwardly reflective, or darkly comic and heartbreakingly remorseful—but always beautifully crafted and unpredictable. In Dischell’s hands, the poems in Children with Enemies come alive to the complications and implications of what it means to be human.