One of the many things that makes Catherine Barnett’s work so compelling is her willingness to look doubt and ennui and abjection squarely in the face. To make it, in fact, a part of the beauty. To welcome it into her lines. It is the grace and candor in the act of that curiosity and attention that makes the beauty. Never to make what is ugly or fallen a morbid delicacy, but to draw an honesty out of writing, a dispassionate and disposed truth-telling about the relentlessness of everyday suffering and sorrow and being. There is a buoyancy, a joy even, in the telling—that’s part of the gift of Barnett’s lyrics. Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space is her fourth collection, and it has all the power of her clarity, but with a new layer of sobriety, somehow, as plainspoken as it is mysterious.