Rachel Zucker's fourth collection of poems, Museum of Accidents, evokes the thinking through and experiencing of complicated and important personal events. Her complex and intense work responds to motherhood and marriage in a way that is both personal and political. By sharing experience through interrogating and dynamic language, Zucker shines light on how we can live honestly against the grain of expected feeling and attitude and how we might feel powerful and passionate in a time of terror and fear. Her insights into motherhood, marriage, Jewishness, and anxiety are not sugarcoated or lyrically smoothed over. Rather, Zucker prizes a directness too complex to be handed over in unopposed declaration. Her poems shift back and forth across the page like the mind working out oppositions, or shifting between what should be and what is. Zucker's book is a felt and smart collection.

This book review originally appeared in American Poets.