"They were born of a cosmic explosion ? blue giants, burning their own hearts to give the world light and warmth." So opens this collection, with a long, incantatory title poem that turns loneliness itself into mythology. The giants are the poet's "other, unconventional friends" ? the depressives, the sleepless, the too-honest, the ones whose purity made them disbelieve in virtue itself. From that mythic overture, the book narrows into dozens of shorter, sharper pieces: aphoristic, unguarded, each one built to turn on its final line like a blade.

Across the collection, the same questions return in different shapes. What does language cost the person who cannot stop confessing in it? What is owed to the friends lost to their own hands ? written here with grief, never spectacle? What does it mean to belong nowhere, one foot in Egypt and one in exile, forever the stranger asked to keep his estrangement quiet?

The Giants does not resolve into comfort. It resolves into something harder-won: by its final pages, the poet who once wanted to be devoured by meaning asks instead to be "an ordinary human being... without wings, without poetry" ? knowing, even as he says it, that he cannot stop being both.

For readers drawn to the confessional intensity of Sylvia Plath and the exile-consciousness of Mahmoud Darwish, this is a collection that earns its title: giants, because only something outsized could carry this much.