Colombine selects from Jennifer Harrison’s four previous collections and adds a book-length group of new poems. In keeping with current practice, the new poems precede the selections, so that anyone wanting to consider Harrison’s twenty-year poetic career in terms of development has to begin some seventy pages in with the poems from her first book, Michelangelo’s Prisoners (1995). You met a lot of her distinctive interests in that book, and it still stands up well. She looks at what we would call embodiment from a distinctly scientific perspective, invoking the position of Humberto Maturana to write poems in which the sea, a major and polyvalent symbol in her work, can stand for the medium in which our embodiment occurs: ‘If each observation is a system / each thought an adaptation, then we drift / upon a spacious sea.’