“It goes without saying that Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone have curated a star-studded anthology of writers—from Ilya Kaminsky to C.D. Wright and Ross Gay—who cultivate an aura of surprise and wonder as their poems draw to a close. But to stop there would be to greatly underestimate Hankins’s and Stone’s powers as editors. What I find so compelling about this anthology—in addition to the masterful craft of the writers gathered here—is the project’s ethical and philosophical underpinnings. Here, Hankins and Stone set forth an ethics of poetic closure, as well as a detailed and practical taxonomy of all the myriad ways a poem can ‘break into blossom.’ Hankins and Stone reveal a poem’s aesthetics as being inextricable from its ethics, and this nuance makes for an incredible teaching tool. This volume is an achievement, a beacon, and a masterclass. Bravo!” - Kristina Marie Darling, author of Look To Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle and Daylight Has Already Come: Poems

Luke Hankins is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a poetry chapbook, Testament (TRP, 2023). He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Work of Creation, and a volume of translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems. With Nomi Stone, Hankins is co-editor of Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2023), first prize in the Middle East Studies Award from the American Anthropological Association and Honorable Mention of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize. With Luke Hankins, Stone is co-editor of Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright fellowship, she was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropology at Princeton and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.