Almost Nothing to Be Scared of

These poems often spring from unlikely sources: professional wrestling, Adam and Eve at the Jersey shore, the misguided promise of tinfoil hats, Uncle Bud on the Moon, Debbie Fuller on Pluto, debatable Bigfoot nomenclature, Richard Nixon’s social-media rejuvenation, and a Nebraska policeman’s run-in with space aliens who tell him, “We want you to believe in us—but not too much.”

In Almost Nothing to Be Scared Of, David Clewell’s most expansive work yet, readers will discover a multiplicity of new ways to take heart—surely no small thing in a world where we’re too often asked to take what we’d rather not.