If you ever want to get into a bar fight, a good instigating question may be, are song lyrics poetry? It seems like most everyone has an opinion on this and very few of those opinions are dispassionate. For some, Bob Dylan and Nas are a modern-day Wordsworth and Shelley. For others, poetry and songwriting are two distinct art forms measured by different standards. There is absolutely no way your humble reviewer will ever answer this question or resolve this controversy in a book review. But I often found myself contemplating these topics while reading Carrie Magness Radna’s new book Shooting Myself in the Dark.

Researching family history can be an addictive enterprise. I recently found this out when I discovered the website findagrave.com. I learned shocking pieces of information about my ancestors that filled me with all the suspense of a great paperback mystery. If you decide to visit this website, please be warned, it may consume days and maybe even weeks of your life. But this leads to an interesting question, how is it that in a society so obsessed with current fads and future possibilities, we can still be so engrossed by origin stories? This is one of the questions that Bruce E. Whitacre explores in his new book, The Elk in the Glade.

An editorial in the New York Times recently claimed that poetry is dead. Among the writer’s spurious arguments was the claim that poetry must be about nature and since our civilization is so far removed from nature, poetic experience is no longer possible. I think this claim tells us more about the writer than it does about poetry; that he has a rather narrow view of what constitutes nature and that he hasn’t read very much contemporary poetry. For if he had, perhaps Design by Theresa Burns, a poetic celebration of the natural world, would have found its way to his bookshelf.

There is something inherently American about a drive on the open road. Other countries certainly have fine cars and highways, but there is a mythic quality to the American road trip that is unique. Perhaps it is because we are a nation that came of age in the era of the automobile that the roar of an engine is embedded within so many of our ideas about freedom, mortality, nature, and the search for meaning. A passion for cars and a willingness to explore these ideas informs much of Elaine Sexton’s latest book, Drive.

Maybe it was the heat, but I thought about violence a lot this past summer. Please do not be concerned, I am not contemplating violence myself; well, at least not beyond what is normal for most folks driving in Seattle these days. No, I am thinking about all of the violent entertainment I have consumed since childhood, from Natural Born Killers to Narcos. I am also thinking about all of the wars my country has waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and the carnage currently inflicted daily by Russia in Ukraine. In Graham Buchan’s new book, The Pleasure of Firing Ba