What I admire in Maxine Kumin’s poems I find in abundance in David Mihalyov’s A Safe Distance: an intimate observance of seemingly ordinary things rendered into arresting lyrics. “Burrow[ing] deeper” beneath suburban routines we may assume we know or dismiss outright, these are instructive poems of great tenderness−toward aged parents whose failings the narrator yearns to forgive; toward a soft-bellied crab stranded on rocks; toward farm boys reinvented as World War II’s killing machines; and, perhaps, even the commuter who passes by a “cut-rate Jesus . . . holding a cardboard sign telling us he was a vet, homeless and hungry.” I am grateful for poems that do not overreach, and within that circumference of rare authenticity, achieve an exquisite humaneness. A Safe Distance is such a collection. ~Alison Meyers