Blue Atlas is an absorbing and heart-wrenching collection that revolves around the poet’s decision, thirty years back, to have an abortion rather than go full term with an unplanned pregnancy. As with many narratives of trauma, there is an underlying nexus of pain which renders the speaking voice hesitant or contradictory so that, one feels, the only certainty on the part of the poet is the absolute uncertainty of whether good life choices have been made. Indeed, the collection hones in on a crucial moment of decision reached only after a “nightmare” of indecision: “I decide / and undecide / a hundred times an hour” (“The Other Side of Paris,” p. 86). Leaving her lover’s apartment in Paris on her “hardest day,” the poet does “what was asked for . . . head[ing] towards the abortion” clinic in Manhattan (“The Decision,” pp. 88-9). But even with the ordeal supposedly over, the nightmare is replayed endlessly as “a mixtape” (p. 88) of “different lives” (p. 86), or other possible destinies that might have unfolded.