When the poet Ed Roberson writes, “we might not be fast enough / to outdistance events,” he has the looming climate catastrophe in mind. 

But climate isn’t his only concern. “Roberson is ever alert to affinities between the small and the vast, the fleeting and the cosmic,” James Gibbons tells us in his review of the poet’s new collection, Asked What Has Changed, which also casts a restless eye on the city of Chicago, African American history, viniculture, and random deaths in the street.

After an exhausting year of vast, if unwelcome, events, more than 2.6 million people worldwide and 530,000 in the US have been unable to outdistance the pandemic. This week we marked the anniversary of plague year; we also began to come to grips with the anxiety of its ending, émigrés from a scarred present blinking at an unimagined future.