Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night-school courses and displaced “adult learners,” from concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history—personal and otherwise. David Axelrod has published five collections of poems, including The Cartographer’s Melancholy, and a collection of essays about the rural Northwest, Troubled Intimacies. He lives in La Grande, Oregon, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Eastern Oregon University.