The Cartographer's Melancholy

"'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and makeit a soul?' Keats asked in a letter to his family. David Axelrod in The Cartographer's Melancholy mapsthat pilgrimage. He follows the refugee road with its transcendence, resignation, and dark dramatichistories, and within each poem he makes the important discoveries, the ones that counterpoise suf-fering against the world's beauty."—Sandra Alcosser

"Like exposures at an archeological dig, 'holy site piled upon / wreckage of holy site,' history presentsus simultaneously with both the miraculous and the annihilated. Many poets would leave us here, definedby our ethical absence, our greatest failures. Instead, Axelrod points us toward the power of individualgesture: of walking in old forest, of giving and receiving, of gathering together. Fearless, his poems enter the dark soul of American Empire and come back speaking the language of light."—Richard Robbins