Reviewed by Aaron Peck

Her poems are shards that pierce us. A cluster is a collection of things, often of fruits or flowers. It can describe the proximity of celestial bodies, such as a star or galaxy cluster, or gatherings of eggs or cells. It is also a kind of bomb, which looks something like a handball. Upon detonation, a cluster bomb sprays metal pellets over a wide blast range. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of them over Laos; cluster bombs have killed or maimed around 50,000 people  in southeast Asia during a war that Richard Nixon never acknowledged. A cluster is also an excruciating kind of headache. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s poetics rest on these kinds of polyvalences. In her work, things that appear simple require close attention. When we give it to them, they have an emotional blast-range. . .