“Yes, the depressing part is handling the bits and shreds, then shoveling almost all of them back into the midden. A poet reading through archival work is bound to obsess:Are my poems the rubble of my era? Every page illustrates how nearly impossible it is to make something that’s not simply your age’s typical flaked point. Recent studies of Neanderthal DNA show how closely modern humans are related to the kin we appear to have exterminated, and scientists speculate about what gave us the edge. Neanderthals were terrific tool makers. Their limitation seems to have been that they spent tens of thousands of years making the same great tool over and over.”