“[H]ello, poetry / passing by,” Jason Koo writes in “Be Less,” one of two sections from his latest long poem, “I’m not sure where you will go but you / are always there.” His lines are plaintive and comic, conversational and grave, as he seeks, amid the daily mayhem of parenting young kids, to rekindle poetry’s “bolting birth of a beyond.” Here’s proof that he does.

“And all the persons stuck // on the train, the morning after the election, / not knowing what happened, what a life had been // extinguished into their suffering, thinking this / is unbearable, great, can this day get any worse….” Swift and spiraling, a new poem from Jason Koo limns our lives among others we never know well enough.