From his first collection A Planet (1983), Arthur Vogelsang has explored the earth’s history, our various human capacities, and the fear that ensues when we come face-to-face with the realities of the world we inhabit and continue to (de) create. However, even as Vogelsang poses questions about our very existence and the possibility of its future, the expedition his poems take us on, to borrow the title from his 2011 Expedition: New and Selected, is always particularized, in both excruciatingly prescient and ecstatic ways. In his latest collection, Orbit, Vogelsang’s maximalist poetics seem supercharged, amplifying the poet’s original concerns regarding our collective fate.

Orbit is split into three sections: “Then,” “Now,” and “When,” an order that clearly suggests a chronology, if not a kind of teleology. Poems dealing with often disturbing and bloody historical events, such as “Verde Valley 1311 AD,” “1150 AD,” and “Before 1901” are grouped in the first section; poems that take up various forms of contemporary rhetoric, such as “Life Is Slightly Different Than You Think It Is” and “Demented Discusses Distinguished” are grouped in the middle section; and poems that warn us of the future we face, including “Face It,” and “Wait a Minute, It’s Simple” fall at the end of the collection. Thematically, however, the collection also circles back on itself, as if to suggest the constant orbital movement in and through time.

As a whole, Orbit delineates ways in which our collective present and future are reflective of a chaotic history of bloody wars, massacre, religious fanaticism, and charlatanism. And since veracity is often called into question within individual poems, Vogelsang not only describes this bind, but enacts it. For instance, “Don’t Ask”—a poem that catalogues various ways that different peoples “fought” including “the heroes and gods,” “three thousand Chinese,” the speaker himself, “we,” and “Achilles”—ends with the line, “Much of this is make-believe and much isn’t” (12). Other poems end with a similarly self-reflexive gesture, such as the heartbreakingly beautiful “The Plan,” which depicts a couple of survivors of “dire circumstances,” who nonetheless “began to laugh” (35). The poem ends: “You do not today on the sofa know the current stopped. / But probably I have to tell you, or maybe not.” Rather than detract from the power of the poem, such turns reenact the complex psychological strategies we often employ to shield each other and ourselves from realities we’d rather not face. So if there is a numbing effect, it is employed to up the ante of the poem’s epistemological argument on our inability to make sense of what is beyond our comprehension or simply senseless.

Throughout, Vogelsang calls to task both our leaders and our own quietism, dizziness, and apathy. Take “Mandate,” for instance: