Reconnaissance

Mark Pawlak is the author of eight previous collections of poems and the editor of six anthologies. His latest books, from which selections appear here, are Natural Histories (Červená Barva Press, 2015) and Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012). His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, and Solstice, among many others. He is retired from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he supported his poetry habit by teaching mathematics. He lives in Cambridge.   "You may learn a lot about botany when you read Mark Pawlak's Reconnaissance, his newest volume of verse. 'No way!' you say. Continue, dear reader. Pawlak's book is act