The opening and closing poems in Charlie Brice's wonderful new collection All the Songs Sung, serve as bookends that celebrate our "blessed insignificance in this world." These poems are about the most essential things: love, loss and the beauty we can find in each and every day, despite the tragedies time will put before us. So find a quiet corner, a favorite chair and hunker down. Savor the flavors, marvel "at the miracle of breath, flesh, life itself," that fill these pages.

--Jason Irwin, author of The History of Our Vagrancies