Bittersweet, melancholy, claiming joy from the quotidian, and praising it all; leaven with a spoonful of humor, and you’ve got Iain Macdonald’s new collection, which does that nifty writer’s trick of offering the concrete detail of the utterly specific and personal, in order to point us back to the universal.

DISCLOSURE 

A good friend claims that 
any meaningful relationship 
requires total honesty, 
and I consider how 
completely I disagree 
and how strongly I believe 
that only the blessing 
of small, daily deceits 
keeps more of us from killing 
those whom we claim to love. 

But, of course, I tell her none of this.