The Apothecary's Heir

• Selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucie Brock-Broido

Poet Julianne Buchsbaum has won acclaim for her "rich, lucid, alliterative lexicon, full of apt surprise" (Reginald Shepherd); "there is something of Wallace Stevens in her precision, her incredible diction," says Matthew Rohrer. Her new collection, The Apothecary's Heir, depicts a damaged world in which the speaker is trying to make sense of human relationships in the aftermath of loss. A series of meditations on landscapes of our postmodern world—a sickbed, a gas station, a bomb shelter, a rest stop along a highway—these supple poems explore the frailty of human connectedness and anatomize desire in a world of pharmaceuticals and microchips.