Transversing the territory between the pastoral and the elegiac, F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Settlers inhabits the hidden, wild places of the American Midwestern landscape. The idea of “settling”–that a landscape can be tamed, that a human consciousness can fall back into immobility–is one these poems grapple with and resist. Within the “settled” landscape, it becomes clear that nothing, in fact, can be settled. Love, compassion, forgiveness, and transcendence all turn out to be moving targets and Settlers offers glimpse after glimpse of an unstable world in whirling, mesmerizing motion.