Heaven’s Thieves by Sue Sinclair  is a collection engaged with the big questions–What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art?–and the urgent ones–how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit.

Matthew Sweeney’s eleventh collection, Inquisition Lane, is haunted by mortality, by other worlds and far-flung places, by visitations and violent events like the Spanish Inquisition. The poems are imaginative riffs featuring troubling companions and troublesome thoughts: ghosts and spirits, anger and guilt, crows and horses, and a footballing elephant. And yet amid the outlandish adventures and macabre musings in Inquisition Lane, other notes are also sounded: the poems can be lyrical as well as exuberant, saddened as well as extravagant.