Five of the roads Maureen Alsop writes of in this poem-series run parallel to the streets she chooses to explore; they are just a line on the map another block over, tree-lined streets we can’t see from where we are on our own tree-lined street. There’s no backtracking to take another road and see what we missed. Thankfully for us as readers, however, we’re able to turn around and around inside these poems, but the sense that there will always be something running alongside them that we can’t fully apprehend is likely to remain.