"The Royal Opera House (With Stage Captions)" narrates an opera set in South Africa, with an "all black cast" of performers who "hide the white man who wrote it." Antrobus lists what else is hidden in the composition: "We don't see the oil or the Coca-Cola Company or land rights or coups or the arms industry or the drug companies." Because of these omissions, the audience is "asked to have more compassion for the man who makes it out alive than anyone poverty trapped," an observation that illuminates the legacies of British colonialism on cultures and individual values. Stage captions, inspired by the deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim and invented for the poem, resist the hearing population's narrow understanding of sound. Across the book, Antrobus places such captions between exquisite poems. For instance, after a poem about the poet's white, English grandmother throwing a racial slur at his Black, Jamaican father, Antrobus provides a page on which is written only the following: [sound of self divided] [running] [breath on paper] The "self divided" most apparently references a mixed racial identity. But as one reads this collection, one encounters a self divided between name and identity, hearing and not hearing, exhaustion and love. A GOD AT THE DOORBy Tishani Doshi109 pp. Copper Canyon. Paper, $16. "The shock we carry is that the world / doesn't need us," Doshi writes in "Self." In this collection so concerned with the apocalyptic inertia of climate change and political violence, however, the self — that is, the human ego at work — is absolutely necessary. Doshi brings complicated emotions to our geopolitical crises; her poems swerve from humorous to plaintive. Humanity, for Doshi, is full of contradiction, of despair coexisting with hope. Take the opening of "After a Shooting in a Maternity Clinic in Kabul": No one forgets there's a war going on,but there are moments you could be forgivenfor believing the city is still an orchard,a place where you could make a thing grow. Throughout the collection, Doshi emphasizes these contradictions through her deft use of line breaks. In "Many Good and Wonderful Things," for instance, Doshi writes, "History is always / reinventing itself." At nearly the same moment, Doshi suggests that history is recognizable as one thing and likewise forever changing — two different statements, achieved by the micro-moment in which the reader's eyes have to move from one line to the next.