HASTINGS: Do you seriously reckon you or anyone can hold up the other kind of mirror to [the Queen] now that’d show her the truth?
WILL [slowly]: What if you could? What if you could make her say, This is me?
—Rowan Williams, Shakeshafte
Walt Whitman wrote that “the mere fact, consciousness”—the very awareness of being a thinking thing with sensations—so awed and pleased him that he could hardly move beyond that initial astonishment. In his fourth book of poems, Chris Forhan lingers in that place of amazement, finding in it bemusement, an occasional flicker of terror, and joy
