In his acclaimed debut collection The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate delivered an ingenious and enigmatic account of the intersections of global, family and personal histories. Now, in The Great Wave, a more personal tone asserts itself as Slate fashions poignant and haunting poems that shock us with a recognition of our perilous times. These are poems of strange and sometimes caustic assessment, reflecting on family, the work life, catastrophe, creativity, solitude, and desire—tracking the transit between reality and the imagination, and creating the sound of its discoveries. Seductive, demanding, witty, and embittered, Slate’s voice comes from a secret, intimate space abutting a large, incongruous world. The poems in The Great Wave, so taken with the collisions between history and contemporary life, remind us that the role of poetry is to confirm our existence by giving shape to the inner world.