James Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent collection of poems, Earthling is a meditation on the ways in which human beings inhabit their knowledge of impending mortality, ranging bemusement to panic. His most recent critical work, Lyric Knowledge: How Poems Get Made is an account of how English-language poems, ranging from the 8 th to the 21 st century, are constructed from the most basic elements of their medium (diction, syntax, rhythm, figuration, and so on). He has also written