While We're Here

While We're Here signals the debut of a poetry that is startling and simple by turns, taking in the classical world and the contempprary with the rigor and inventiveness of its forms. This book is a narrative that moves edgily from the natural world to the social, from the social to the historical. Elegant, sometimes brutal, Madoff's poems echo each other, back and forth, weaving a whole that records the miraculous wealth of the natural world and our own miracles and mayhem within it.