The Smallest Mistake We Call Human

Isaac Pickell writes from the middle of things: the tensions between Blackness and Jewishness, between loss and inheritance, between being seen and being claimed. But these poems don't search for wholeness so much as they honor the seams—the complicated, unresolved places that keep our lives together.

Grief runs through. Much of it is personal: parents aging, partners wavering, friends dying, old selves discarded. But some of it is inherited—grief for everything America never let become poss...