AFTERWORDS, Leon Weinmann's debut poetry collection, investigates the power-and powerlessness-of the lyric to respond to time and loss. In a fallen, hyperconscious world in which "the echo follows what it should precede," in which words arrive too late, as mere addenda to experience, how can language, and poetry specifically, create our necessary "small round world, held out to hold/ a place for everything that's lost"? Weinmann's poems, ranging from traditional sonnets and blank verse to more radically experimental forms, push language beyond consolation and praise and toward a possibility of atonement with the world of things.