Every aging poet seems to write a book confronting his or her own mortality. By the time they do, many have already fallen into a rut, but John Koethe’s philosophical and wistful Ninety-fifth Street is his best book yet. In these accessible and surprisingly powerful poems, Koethe looks back at his youth, his encounters with his literary heroes and his evolution as a poet himself. “That’s what poetry is,” he writes, “a way to live through time, / And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.”
