Driving in Vermont, the poet notices how “the road Vanna-Whites its crops / of corn.” When he leaves his wife, she is “entrenched in her prison / of dreams facing her bedside clock ticking / off the minutes.” Two moving elegies, one for Ntozake Shange and one for Derek Walcott, are the central balancing points of the book. Each place is a way to summon moments of keen observation about art, politics and regret: “In the Yi Slavery Museum, a Bimo’s / screeching dispossession of cries and words / reminds me: we have only each other in the end.” Moments of startling linguistic play disrupt Jackson’s elegant, semiformal style.

With settings from Xichang to Philadelphia to Paris, the writing is sophisticated and far more than mere travelogue. “What counts is not the best living but the most living,” Camus says in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and Jackson brings us across the world to dive deep into this surplus. “The Absurd Man,” Jackson’s erudite fifth collection, examines the contradictions and possibilities in our search for meaning. His reply is simultaneously baffling and relatable: “I was disappearing.” The son shakes his head. In one of these poems, set at a bar in New York City, the speaker’s grown son asks him how he could have betrayed his family.

Obit by Victoria Chang