In You Cannot Shoot a Poem, Paula Closson Buck offers sharp-witted, deeply felt, and skillfully structured poems. With clear and powerful imagery, these poems reveal an urgent need to rethink the way we interact with each other and the planet. Touching on racism, environmental exploitation, and failed political diplomacy, Closson Buck relies on the ability of poetry to enter otherwise hidden or forbidden territories.

Closson Buck transports readers to the abandoned city of Varosha, Cyprus, with its history of interethnic violence; to Venice, Italy, as the water in the Lagoon rises; to Niagara Falls, New York, where she sets a personal moral compass against environmental degradation and religious zeal. She examines the decline of these cities with precise attention to the lives caught in the current.

Sometimes satiric and sometimes elegiac, You Cannot Shoot a Poem inhabits a troubled world while inspiring confidence in the human ability to create change.