A woman leaps from the Empire State Building but falls only a single floor before she is blown back inside. So begins Christina Olson’s second collection of poetry, a rollicking, richly imagined mosaic that pits science, history, and fate against one another in an attempt to answer the bedeviling questions of cause and effect. Terminal Human Velocity is a steady-voiced, multi-faced narrative of the human condition, mythic yet modern—keenly inquisitive, never complacent, and ceaselessly compelling.