When I read Russell Karrick’s chapbook, The Way Back, I fell into a near-sublime awe at the tightness of this collection, the depth and complexity within the concision of these pages. Nothing is extra, nothing missing. These 20 short lyric poems about the start of Karrick’s new life in Colombia, his marriage, and the birth of his son, remind me of the mechanisms of a watch: the numerous wheels, the springs and pallet fork—each tiny piece meticulous in its work but containing time itself.

The collection comes out swinging in “Delirium”:

We used to drink rain in the garden
until the fruit fell and rotted.

Now, I wear a scarf
of frost and claw at the wounds
below my skin.

The sense of Karrick’s inner unrest is clear in his lines. “I’m thirty-three and feel like I know / less by the day” he says in “On Being the Age of Jesus,” but he knows enough not to panic or surrender. Instead, Karrick is patient: “Tonight, / I’ll lay on my belly like a snake / and hug the earth’s dust.”

By the final poem, his family and the wonders of life in a new culture help him find his way back to the beginning. But it is a new beginning. As Karrick walks through the garden with his son in “At Dusk”, the fruit reappears, and life’s spiral begins its next upward gyre:

In the sky, the moon is not yet
a moon, but I whisper its name
into his ear, and as I begin
to walk back toward the house,
he stops me near the guava trees.
I move us closer while he stretches
his arm and, by some instinct
I’ve long lost to reason, plucks
the only red fruit among the leaves.