Rarely does a debut collection deliver so effortlessly on the promise of poetry as it is lived, offering its readers an intuitive musicality paired with careful observation and a certain stillness of mind. The voices in these poems somehow manage to be openly self-conscious while remaining expressive, deliberate, and measured. It's as if Dominique Townsend feels altogether at home in whatever environment she finds herself, confident in her abilities to describe/unearth/translate from the temporal moment any universal experience it may contain, or explicate the emotional cathexis as generated by the human situation in which it resides. In these poems searching is an act of faith-but a wandering, hard-won faith, lived-in and inseparable from its discovery-where the fleeting is found to be necessary and worthy of our examination and praise. The Weather & Our Tempers offers a vision of a world exceptional as it is mundane, funny as it is tragic, a world that relies on our perception of it even as it changes our perception. It is a world that is rejuvenating, but always with death right there in the background, the sacrifice required for our recording: "something needs / to be offered up / for the sake of the story." Here is a book that while relishing ideas, persons, objects-allowing each their own place and instance-simply cannot let things be.