In Wayne Johns' Vivarium, "everything's a reconstruction" teeming with life, death, and memory. These poems navigate the borders and edges of "war memorials, battlefi elds, crime scenes barricaded with police tape," and envelop the reader in worlds both lush and stark. A clear, strong voice threads seamlessly through poems that vary just the right amount in style and form to hold the reader's rapt attention, as various facets of loss and grief-personal, communal, political, historical-are illuminated. Th e speaker reckons with a deep south in which "Violence is its past. Its present / violence is silence...."