John Koethe unravels timeless questions of death, math, meaning, and much more in this mesmerizing collection. John Koethe, one of our most philosophically sophisticated poets, has written a book of pithy, contentious, witty poems about our perennial, never-satisfied search for meaning. The silent mysteries of the stars and the mute beauty of human graves have deep similarities that Koethe probes in these poems with a wondering, wandering gimlet eye that will delight the reader when they don’t terrify them. Cemeteries and Galaxies is an extraordinarily provocative and, perhaps surprisingly, consoling book.