In preparing this review of Alexis Ivy’s Saturnalia Books Editors Prize-winning Taking the Homeless Census, I considered many entry points: giving voice to marginalized populations as she does in the book’s opening crown of sonnets, “The A-Street Shelter”; “The Poem _______” series that considers what it means to love the wrong person; fraught family dynamics; the skilled use of forms—sonnet, pantoum, ghazal, villanelle. But one sentence keeps coming back: “I just can’t help / but save someone” (“Spare Change”).

As individually important as all those readings of the book are, they would be nothing without this simple idea, this notion that above all else, our duty is to each other. We may see putting change in a parking meter that’s about to expire or “feed[ing] crows dried corn, / watch their yellow beaks / peck at dirt as if / they’re making room to pray” as small acts of compassion, but they help us remain committed to doing for others as we hope they would do for us. These poems are calls to action to think outside ourselves, to make poetry in all its quiet and private beauty lead to a public act of unity and empathy.

What can’t go unnoticed either is the need to help those who help others. Over the past year, we’ve heard calls to celebrate the essential workers who have kept our lives and economy afloat, but have we done enough to aid them as they continue their work? To dedicate your life to the lives of others is right and honorable, but it can also be lonely, as the speaker of “Allegiance in Five Stanzas” suggests when the weight of telling stories of the homeless she’s worked with begins to overwhelm her:

I break my heart on the page,
writing my bridled life,
I carry everyone along.
Born for this and to this.

A pat on the back or a kind word about this social justice work, both as an advocate for the homeless and as a poet, won’t go unappreciated, but these poems also ask bigger questions: How do we join in this mission? How do we save the someone who “can’t help / but save someone”? When the hard labor is being done by someone who thinks, “It’s hard to stay gold. / Impossible to stay gold,” what more can we do to remind them how precious they are?