Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night school courses and displaced "adult learners," concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants, to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, "What Next, Old Knife?" is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history--personal and otherwise. "Learned and lyrical, sensuous and cerebral, speaking as sharply, usefully and dangerously as a trusted knife, this is a great book of poetry." -Henry Hughes, author of "Moisture Meridian"David Axelrod has published five collections of poems, including "The Cartographer's Melancholy," and a collection of essays about the rural Northwest, "Troubled Intimacies." He lives in La Grande, Oregon, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Eastern Oregon University.