“I write sonnets empty of everything yet containing all things…” goes a visual and philosophical echo of the unutterable “G–d” ACTION interrogates, prods. Such slippery refrains drive this lively book’s composition and arguments. Birds fall throughout, echoing the rough descent of haloed, winged things; the speaker wrestles an angel by a river and, in a later poem, a father by a sink; prophets stumble about stripped of epic context, conscripted to a world of Doritos bags, iPhones, and prescription meds. Indeed, religion and the sacred’s place in the contemporary are on Opal’s mind. For as much as, say, “Out of the Whirlwind” might aver otherwise, these adroit and contemplative poems don’t only fuck with “ideas of the holy,” they seek them out.

-DOUGLAS KEARNEY, author of Patter and The Black Automaton

If you’ve ever opened the hood of a car and found a motor of flowers or opened a closet and out flew a flock of waxwings, monarchs and philosophers, you’ll be prepared for these poems. Otherwise, reader, get ready for the brilliant onslaught of these prayerful evocations, these rollercoaster sonnets, these radiant affirmations of life and art.

-DEAN YOUNG, author of Bender: New and Selected Poems