When

the long version

The most salient feature of Baron Wormser's work is its empathy. As he says in "Poems," Your soul's a canyon. And their souls too. Wormser conflates his soul with the reader's soul and thereby erodes conventional distinctions between "us" and "them.". But Wormser seems most likely to identify with us when we feel excluded, estranged, awkward, when we resist the homogenizing effects of modern life. His speakers and subjects range from a lowly ant to the residents of a terminal children's ward to a naively idealistic hippie confronting the guardian of a missile silo in the Midwest. The voices in these poems do not observe so much as sink down into the inexplicably unfair lottery of life, giving us perspective from both the blessed and luckless among us.