Sad Little Breathing Machine

Harvey, whose debut collection was praised by the New Yorker as "intensely visual, mournfully comic and syntactically inventive," offers her second stunning collectionUnits are the enginesI understand best.One betrayal, two.Merrily, merrily, merrily.-from "Introduction to the World"In Sad Little Breathing Machine, Matthea Harvey explores the strange and intricate mechanics of human systems-of the body, of thought, of language itself. These are the engines, like poetry, that propel both our comprehension and misunderstanding. "If you're lucky," Harvey writes, "after a number of / revolutions, you'll / feel something catch."