The things we are not seeing

The Things We Are Not Seeing is Cristina Gallegos's 17th book and sixth poetry volume. It is a field manual for contact with the global "now" ancient architecture, hedgehog tenderness, military engineering in high heels, expensive nouns for crowd control, and occasional profanity deployed as percussion. The poems move through private longing and public repair, body panic and sovereignty, civic grief and eros, the absurdity of love and the work of building when the world churns. Humor waits around the corner because the alternative would be too pious, and the stakes are real. There are pretty moments too, without making prettiness the contract. The book has Gods, lipstick, fathers, daughters, airports, Munich rain, Athens heat, samurai severity, social pain, and a nervous system that keeps interrupting metaphysics to ask for a sandwich. For readers navigating transition, desire, grief, over-functioning, beauty, fatigue, faith, and the refusal to disappear, this book offers language for the moments when the invisible finally becomes visible. It is not exactly a book people will use to relax. It is more likely a book they will use to remember what they had been politely sedating.