Sara Lupita Olivares’s CantoMundo Poetry Prize-winning collection Migratory Sound challenges us to do more than see, to do more than hear, to do more than say. The passive way we process what we think we know of the world isn’t enough.

Too often, like in “Without Vanishing,” we allow flashes of beauty, of meaning, to fade without recognizing how all the pieces fit together:

                        to perceive, the viewer
                                   turns back
                       from the object

                        a landscape becomes
                       antiquity

                        our own peculiarities
                       most hidden

We desire to control the moment, to understand what it means to us individually, but that choice lets us down. We see what we want to see, even if we want our biases to remain “most hidden.” We filter reality into something that pleases us even if “outside the frame there is / a shifting that begs / correction.” The truth and significance of the experience becomes secondary, and we move on, wrongly, as

                        a wilderness in a succession
                                   of bring colored images

                        continually disappear[s] from
                       view

At the conclusion of “Glimpse,” the speaker notes, “it is not a mistake when the rustling quiets and then stops. The animal remains / hidden.” But though it may be unseen, its voice still ripples through the world and travels back to us, the sound reminding us there is still something watching us and, more importantly, watching out for us. The world is too full of wonder—“a doe’s spotted back / camouflaged. the sea nearly uprooted where rocks emerge and empty,” “a perfectly intact bird dead under the dogwood, its shadow cast empty,” “the sinew / of my own intrusion”—to not take heed of gifts we might otherwise gloss over as day passes into night, and we pass into dream.

Migratory Sound reminds us how much we need this “lupita meaning little wolf.” We need her eye to help us look, we need her ear to help us listen, and we need her howl to help us understand what it is to speak. We need this world, this book, all of it.