The voice in Alex Phillips’s Unkindness lurches toward us, addled. It skips like a scratched record. It probes and burrows always forward, sometimes HUMANITY pleading—oh orange give up your greatness to me. Reading these poems can be a bit like flying a plane that CALAMITY is beginning to rattle. I mean really rattle. And nothing you do helps any. But the flight, I want to tell you, is REDEMPTION thrilling. —Michael Earl Craig