But how shall I begin (again)?

In this month's Boston Review, poet Richard Deming evaluates Ann Lauterbach's latest collection, Or to Begin Again. He frames the book in terms of contemporary politics, and bears in mind the apocalyptic event that seemed to mark the start of upheaval without end:

This question of endings and beginnings, of ruin begetting ruin, of narrative fashioning narrative, is not only metaphoric or simply literary. Nor is the question merely rhetorical after the events of September 2001, events that eventually plunged the United States into what have become wars seemingly without end and, on the other end of the spectrum, propelled us toward the election of Barack Obama and all the changes that election both signaled and produced. Despair and hope mark our time in, it would seem, equal measure.

The poems of Ann Lauterbach’s Or to Begin Again probe the difficult questions—ethical, emotional, political, and even spiritual—of accounting for despair while allowing for it to become something more than a mechanism pressing the death drive forward. How do any of us, Lauterbach’s poems ask, begin again without turning our backs on catastrophic events, events that, like a bad dream, seem to continue to shape and define the present and our sense of a possible—or impossible—future? How does one respond to the world, then, in the aftermath of the aftermath?