Early on in Something to Carry Home and Not Kill, this brief clause appears: “We are searching for something,” a straightforward declaration that confronts the complexities of being alive and couples them with the endeavor to make clear what that something might be. Jeremy Voigt sees and sings and searches with words. He is a schoolteacher in an epoch of school shootings; he is a father in an evermore tenuous world; he is also a man who finds in that very world everything to live for. His words are beautiful and his compassions vast, and, as he insists, with all attendant irony, “I’ve done nothing to deserve this.”

—Robert Wrigley