With every line of Jason Irwin’s poems, our love for life is sharpened—even while those lines recount the losses, the heartaches, the hauntings, the treacheries of time. Here is “that dark, dreamy other world.” And here is comfort, companionship, longing, and then suddenly an acute sorrow that somehow makes us want more of the whole tragic beautiful thing, more of it, more . . . —Jean LeBlanc