oppressive rule of de Men, is that humans have lost the ability to reproduce, though something like love exists for some. The title suggests a plot embroidered by thoughts that transcend the action, implying perhaps a problematic supernatural . Indeed, with names such as Jean de Men, Christine, Trinculo, Joan, and a platform called CIEL, the teasers are there. And there are the grafted stories of Joan and a real Joan. We are intrigued, even if we are not entirely satisfied. I spent several foolish minutes puzzling over certain letters on the cover and spine that had a sort of gray smudge. I was thrust back to high school, filling out a book review form that asked me to complete “The theme of this book is . . .” The novel certainly has perspectives: an opening analysis of humans’ impossible situation, meditations on what has been lost and is now sought for, humans as part of all matter and energy, united with other “raging organisms that won’t give up”—a rage that can seek love or death. Can aspirations against circumstance ever succeed in a postapocalyptic setting ? A climactic battle has movement, violence , color, joinings, and sunderings, all in a haze, with theatrical shafts of light. Things happen, certainly—destruction and unification—but we see darkly. Our failure to have a clear view of an outcome corresponds to an earlier, blurred demonstration of possible earthly regeneration that does not quite suspend disbelief. The Book of Joan is an impressive structure built of stories and meditations, worshipful of life, love, and resistance. It offers hope, without a consoling clarity. That may be as much as the survivors of a humaninduced apocalypse deserve. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Verse Ryszard Krynicki. Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, 1968–2014. Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York. New Directions. 2017. 224 pages. Ryszard Krynicki belongs to the extraordinary generation of Polish poets, known as the New Wave, who came of age in the late 1960s. Not to be confused with their cinematic counterparts elsewhere in Europe, the poets—besides Krynicki, the names one encounters most often include Adam Zagajewski, Stanisław Barańczak, and Julian Kornhauser—preferred the straight talk to poeticizing. Disgusted with the thinly veiled lies of official propaganda, they saw the directness of their poems, which they hoped anyone could understand , as an antidote to the omnipresent governmental obfuscating that pervaded their daily existence. However, Krynicki and Barańczak, who lived in Poznań, quite a ways from Kraków-based Zagajewski and Kornhauser, preferred a poetics rooted in linguistics that played up the absurdities which existed between the People’s Republic ideology and the daily reality. In any case, as this volume—the first to showcase a broad selection of Krynicki’s work in English—deftly illustrates, the chief trademarks of his work are “compression , mysticism, wit.” What’s more, as Clare Cavanagh reminds us, “Like Szymborska, another of his masters, he is a specialist in the infinite varieties of ‘nothing’ that surround us in poetry and life alike.” Here’s a fragment quoted by the translator in her introduction: “Nothing, night beyond the glass / looks through me with the non-gaze / of the boy I was, am // not, won’t be.” The kind of breaking of syntax we see here is rather common in Poland these days, as is the resulting careful interplay between the words and the white space, but it wasn’t always so. By translating Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, among other German -language poets, Krynicki perfected the kind of poem that one whispers rather than shouts. His crystalized poems resemble prayers. Reading these poems, one cannot help but notice that with time Krynicki became less concerned with mining the linguistic incongruities of his surroundings seen as if “through an iron curtain of clouds” than with becoming more like the Japanese haiku masters he reveres. While the reader encounters a gem here and there early on in the book, the final sixty pages feature his finest work. Meditative, precise, recording his travels and impressions of the natural world, they fulfill the promise of an earlier poem, called “How to Write?”: “To write so that a hungry man / might think it’s bread...