The Nature of Things Fragile

Peter Vertacnik has curated “Forgotten Good Poems” online for years—all the while learning from his readings how to create memorable lines of his own: “No ashes now, just the syllables of doves.” The Nature of Things Fragile is full of poems that deserve to endure. — Amit Majmudar Peter Vertacnik is a poet of great emotional and intellectual range. The fact that The Nature of Things Fragile is his first collection seems almost incomprehensible. He possesses a refined touch, curiosity, humility, and ability to achieve wholeness that can be rare to find even in writers three or four books deep into their careers. To be sure, the love, longing, wit, and learning in this work are clearly hard-won, but these beautiful poems converse with their subjects in the most natural and compelling terms. Piece by piece, this book evokes in me a sense of kinship, trust, and admiration for the ways in which it distills experience and loveliness to discover such knowable yet highly elusive conundrums of the human heart. — Daniel Anderson I admire so many of these poems, from exquisitely crafted cameos such as “Wind” (a trenchant evocation of the “sharpened vacancy” of Lubbock) to the longer, more personal poems in an elegiac key. Born of Vertacnik’s keen-eyed, sympathetic vision and shaped by his considerable formal inventiveness and skill, The Nature of Things Fragile is a collection to savor. — Geoffrey Brock