Connie Mae Oliver’s book of anti-war poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter and Me (The Operating System, 2017), contains lyric silences that are, in Louise Glück’s phrase, “dense with argument,” though Oliver’s real touchstones are Susan Howe and Claudia Rankine. The poet’s first collection moves among sequences and vantage points, cycles of self-erasures, poems of repeated lines, and cosmic lists. Astronomy pioneer Johannes Kepler makes multiple appearances as a simultaneously ethereal and earthly man with “only two friends: his cigarettes and the sun.” Haunting just under the book’s slanted vantage and shifting locus is the uncertainty principle: how we can never measure particles, or particulars, in terms of both position and momentum at the same time. This collection embraces the necessary management of both the flawed position we are in, and the direction we are going. —Ryan Smith