Schiff is a poet who writes about well-made things—the eponymous Colt revolver, steamship furniture, a designer dress. Her poems are themselves well made, and uncommonly elaborate, things: they ask why, and when, we enjoy such qualities as they admire—elaboration, complication, flourishes, and virtuoso details.

All her poems describe things, but none describes just one; rather, they skate across uncommon associations. “Project Paperclip” moves from the eponymous government program (which brought Nazi rocket scientists to the U.S.) to German folk-art drinking glasses “in the shape of a / horn, a stag… a penis / or a boot,” to the legendary Chinese man who tried to visit the moon in a floating chair, to the Asian Longhorned Beetle (which hollows out wood), to The Amityville Horror, to “a silk peasant blouse that throws its purple // silk light back at the moon it came from,” first sold on or around September 11, 2001. One of the pleasures in reading the poem lies in seeing how she gets from one thing to the next—and how they all come together by the end.

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—Stephen Burt