Exploring the spontaneous interaction of behaviors by which birds flock and fish travel in schools, this collection of poetry sees language as an example of “emergence.” These shimmering poems—which attempt to surprise the reader out of familiar ways of understanding nature, mortality, loss, and love—articulate a vast, roving philosophical curiosity channeled through urgent form. Using a voice both sophisticated and simple, forged in unadorned couplets tuned to near-hallucinatory clarity, Carson’s poems invent a new way of perceiving, a world where “everything unites, at odds with itself.”