I read today's poem as a postmodern "carpe diem" poem, one that dispenses with sexual politics and goes to the heart of the matter for human beings of all genders: Life does not last, and we would do well to learn to enjoy it as it is while we are still in it.

Cancer may have been what spurred Jane Underwood to begin writing again, but the poems transcend the specific circumstances of her illness to become a powerful meditation on mortality, the terminal illness that infects us all.

“Sieve” begins, as all good poems should, with an attention-grabbing first line, “Young men seem all edges,” and then ups the interest ante with two delightful and apt similes, “shoulders like shelves” and my favorite, “bellies like slides / to the most obvious / of pleasures.” That’s a sly, possibly punning allusion to sex, of course, and one I haven’t seen before but that feels just right.

What a beautiful, sad poem. It treats an issue with high contemporary stakes—drug addiction among traumatized combat veterans—and also delivers a subtle and intelligent critique of war.

“En Route to Bolinas, A Rose” takes us on a journey that is spiritual as well as physical that leads us to the edge of a precipice, offering a glimpse into the darkness and mystery of the terrible eternal. That it does this by mimicking the action of human thought in a poem that feels light, vivid, and as fresh as a watercolor still on the easel to dry, is its genius.

The simple everyday things—having a house to repair, a child who is alive and cooing, a glass of water to drink—here become paramount so we see them afresh for the gifts they are.

If literature and poetry are ways to remember our beloved dead, they can also be ways of mourning the unborn. Who will remember us after we are gone? It’s a question this poem asks and to which is itself its own answer.

There are more ways to parent than what biology can offer. We all have important mothers in our lives with whom we share not DNA but things that matter more: spirit, heart, and love.