These poems often spring from unlikely sources: professional wrestling, Adam and Eve at the Jersey shore, the misguided promise of tinfoil hats, Uncle Bud on the Moon, Debbie Fuller on Pluto, debatable Bigfoot nomenclature, Richard Nixon's social-media rejuvenation, and a Nebraska policeman's run-in with space aliens who tell him, We want you to believe in us-but not too much.

In Almost Nothing to Be Scared Of, David Clewell's most expansive work yet, readers will discover a multiplicity of new ways to take heart-surely no small thing in a world where we're too often asked to take what we'd rather not.