Maria Nazos’s fine new poetry collection begins with an “Ars Poetica’” declaring that nothing is off the table for her: not how “the empty bottles in my old place/chimed into the recycling bin like a vagrant’s morning anthem”; not the lover “who lived in a rotted cabin in Vermont// with a half-dead dog and nothing but dried kippers to eat.”

Indeed, Nazos confronts it all: the light that brings uplift and the darkness where the mysteries we often call love all-too-often conjure traumas of uncontrollable need, desire, fear and suffering,

For example, “Flashbacks” depicts a couple lying in bed as “Fireworks spatter glittering anemones that light up the bedroom/ windows.” The woman silently revels in finding “someone she can lie beside.” But, as in so many of these poems, that’s only half the story; her joy is overshadowed for readers as the fireworks propel the man’s thoughts back to Baghdad, when, as a soldier, he “burst/ into a native’s home, and the children were screaming [..]”

Nazos’ deftly reveals changing perspectives and upended expectations: the older woman recalling how, in her youth, she “danced rainbows across the floor,” but now understands that beauty is much deeper than this; the porn-watching slumlord who is surprisingly kind, “[w]ho listened, plunger// in hand, while you sobbed after a date […]”

Nazos’ images are vivid and fresh, and while this is heavy material, she displays a sly wit that keeps her poems from drowning in bathos and pity (“When the guy in the bar says that he loves nothing more/ in this world than tits and violin, in that order,// and I don’t punch him, I know that I’ve mellowed with age […]”)

Occasionally Nazos wobbles into cliché (“a beauteous sunrise”), sentimentality, or awkward word choice. But these are truly minor quibbles for an affecting collection that offers relief even among the ashes. “Tonight, the world is on fire,” Nazos writes. “The heat so stifling you’re afraid […]/ Yet that’s how every hope/ is born.”