Blue Rooms is a clear-sighted book, arresting in the beauty of its imaginative and linguistic artistry, but also in the elegiac power it wrings from the poet’s dead-level doubts about the whole idea of arresting beauty with imagination and language. Creech pushes these anxieties past conventional literary paradox into the realm of human consequence, till they open out, naturally, into a number of serial meditations that furnish the poet with occasions to ponder the limits of memory, experience, perception, and reality itself, all with his usual tact and acuity. Then, in the same book, Creech can turn around and give us, in a less speculative vein, ‘The Confession,’ a devastating monologue, spoken by one of the perpetrators of a lynching, that affirms the promise of good poetry as a spur to serious moral reflection. Morri Creech engages and challenges his reader, and himself, at the intellectual, philosophical, and emotional levels, and the result is a truly dynamic and remarkable book. — Joshua Mehigan