What can I say about this stunning collection? How about: I had to tape the cover down to take these photos because I’ve already wrecked the book by reading it so intensely in my hot, fiddly hands.

A Brief History of My Sex Life from Lily Poetry Review Books is like the Salish Sea, which once spread across parts of the Pacific Northwest not far from where Bacon lives. Ancient seas like Salish were lush ecosystems teeming with life. They’ve left behind more than we could ever discover: traces of lives and worlds not unlike the ones this body of work pulls from history, family, culture, art, poetry, spirituality, and more, as if excavating artifacts from the seabed.

The book’s scope and what it sets out to achieve are evident in the title, which mirrors Stephen Hawking’s landmark cosmological book A Brief History of Time. But Hawking’s work was not just an encyclopedia of all things vast. It made complex concepts accessible to people, even those without a background in physics. Bacon’s work does that, too, bringing us in close to tell us stories about their life and the lives of those around them.

This collection is about identity, not identification. For me, that’s an important distinction. Some of the stakes are high in the work (and getting higher every day in this world). But A Brief History of My Sex Life doesn’t stake claim in the sense of asserting. Rather, it’s a kind of gleaning without possession or possessiveness, of scratching below the surface, looking closely at what’s there, and saying, Here, come have a look at what I found. I want to show you so you can see it, too.

Images: 1. The cover of A Brief History of My Sex Life. 2. An interior page from the collection. 3. Another interior page from the collection along with a pomegranate. 4. The back cover of the collection with the pomegranate and an hourglass lying on its side. Get it? Because the book literally stops time while you’re reading it.