Above ground : poems / Clint Smith.

All at once -- Waiting on a heartbeat -- Facetime -- Passage -- It's all in your head -- Trying to light a candle in the wind -- When people say "We have made it through worse before" -- By chance -- In the grocery store you are wrapped tightly onto my chest -- Ode to the electric baby swing -- Ode to the infant hiccup -- Ode to the first smile -- Nociception -- Your national anthem -- For Willie Francis, the first know person to survive and execution by electric chair, 1946 -- Roots -- Across generations -- The drone -- Pangaea -- The New York Times reports that 200 civilians have just been killed by U.S. military air strikes -- The great escape -- Nomenclature -- This is an incomprehensive list of all the reasonos I know I married the right person -- Lines in the sand -- And the world keeps spinning -- Tree rings -- Here not there -- At the Superdome after the storm has passed -- It is Halloween night and you are dressed as a hot dog -- When we took you to the beach for the first time -- Ode to the bear hug -- For your first birthday -- When we told you another baby was coming -- Legacy -- Counting descent II -- Where are they now -- I am looking at a photo -- The first time I saw my grandfather cry -- Coming home -- Cartography -- After the storm they attempted to identify the bodies -- For the doctor's records -- Deceit -- Expedience -- For the doctor's records-- follow up -- We see another school shooting on the news -- The gun -- This year was the first year I could not remember your voice -- Ode to the double stroller -- Gold stars -- Zoom school with a toddler -- In the ocean there is a small jellyfish -- Ossicones -- You ask me what sounds a giraffe makes -- Yesterday afternoon I took you to the park -- The most remarkable thing about dinosaurs -- Ars poetica -- Above ground -- Tradition -- What I've learned -- Dance party -- The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest galaxy to our Milky Way -- Alarm -- Prehistoric questions -- Punctuation -- Univers(al) -- Ode to bedtime -- Ode to those first fifteen minutes after the kids are finally asleep -- When standing in a cabin at the Whitney Plantation -- Look at that pond.

This poetry "collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up-through the changing world of which we are all a part." --publisher's website.