A Common Name for Everything

The poems inA Common Name for Everythingbuild idiosyncratic worlds around the themes of nature, home, parenting, and naming-worlds that are at once poignant and absurd: a professional namer of lakes explains his standards; the rural gods are given names; a study of sheep results in loneliness. Steeped in sound play and borrowing academic language to create a specimen lens, these poems bask in the local as they seek to name even the commonest earthly things.