We Don't Know We Don't Know

“If this remarkably ambitious collection is in some ways an ontological quest exploring the limits of optics and epistemology with reference to Darwin and Aristotle, Petrarch and Christ, Plato and Tutankhamen, it is also a celebration of bees and eels and finches, of wildfires and crickets and light. Moving seamlessly from fable and folk tale to history and mathematics and physics, these exquisitely speculative pieces continually tug at the heart and tease the reader into thought. Having read Nick Lantz’s wonderful poetry, no matter what I don’t know I don’t know, I do know I know: this is truly a book of marvels, a marvel of a book.”

“Nick Lantz’s wonderful collection We Don’t Know We Don’t Know makes liberal use of quotes from Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder. Yes, I said Rumsfeld and Pliny—whose words, in Lantz’s hands, work beautifully to frame the poet’s exploration of the life and times of all things transient, including ourselves. Rumsfeld contributes the title We Don’t Know We Don’t Know and the section titles as well, dividing the book and the world into ‘Known Knowns,’ with its Pliny-inspired ‘The order that Bees keepe in their worke’; the ‘Known Unknowns,’ with its single stunning poem about torture, ‘Will There Be More Than One “Questioner”?’; the ‘Unknown Unknowns,’ with darker poems like ‘What We Know of Death by Drowning’ and ‘Harry Harlow in the Pit of Despair’; and the final ‘Unknown Knowns,’ where the book closes with ‘Of the last peeces of Painters,’ a transcendent meditation on the nature of art. We Don’t Know We Don’t Know is an expansive and magnanimous book, one that will renew your appreciation of the value of poetry—and life.”