As I read and re-read this book, I sometimes had to stop to exclaim, "brilliant!" and to read a phrase or line again. Richard Nester is a natural philosopher who digs up life's awkward truths and ambiguities with wit and wordplay. Even the most serious poems are edged with humor, like the implicit irony in a poem about the execution of Japan's prime minister for war crimes after World War II, or the bitter-sweet moment when the poet's mother, "poking / the veil of her dementia," strains to express her last need—"a grey sweat shirt." Like a crazy kid jumping from stone to stone across a fast-flowing river, Nester takes breathtaking leaps in subject matter and language, stumbling after the essence of a poem via raccoons and elephants—this book has a lot of animal life—or shifting from one idea or image to another, as in "Jackie O," in which he travels from "the runes of her eyebrows" to coupons expiring. You think he's going to fall in, but he has perfect balance. Still, there are no hard answers in Nester's world. He views life's absurdities with a mature eye. A poem about marriage starts, "Some day my wife will surely tie me to a post / and shoot me" but heads towards the ending with "so shoot me full of caramels, sweetie, / you've earned it"—as Nester must surely earn kudos and caramels for this very fine book.

Charlotte Innes, author of Descanso Drive

Praise for Gunpowder Summers

These unusual poems continually surprise with their diction, imagery, and range, their way of turning scientific understanding into metaphor, and their wildly associative leaps, twists, turns, and fascinating connections. Always thoughtful and inventive, these poems can be political, philosophical, historical or personal, or all of these at once. They are often wryly humorous, as well as compassionate as they re-invent both the nature poem and the elegy. These are poems that delight and repay many readings.

Judy Kronenfeld, author of Bird Flying through the Banquet