Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In "Wooden Comb," Fisher-Wirth writes, "I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning." Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do.

-Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate