☀ Editor's Choice: "Human Technology" Nomi Stone

In her occasional series, "Second Acts," poet Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at two provocative second collections, one published at least twenty years ago, and the other a recent publication. This month she investigates Barbara Guest's The Blue Stairs, published in 1968, and Gracie Leavitt's Livingry, published in 2018.

“'The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly' is a public poem in a number of ways, even if it doesn’t make any grand (or correct) statements about our immediate political situation or about anything that very many people really know or care about. It is a poem about a private figure who became a public one only after his death and only by chance. A poem about a work of monumental public art and about trying to make sense of that. A poem about race and religion."