Despite its unassuming low-key title, emOn Sunday Afternoonsem is a collection of vividly stimulating surprises-whether of natural description, emotional understanding, or bristling with tactful literary reference. What I especially admire is how in poem after poem Becker startles a reader into refreshed appreciation of what we think of as the ordinary world. Ordinary yes, but extraordinary too in the near-haiku glimmer and glow with which the poet animates small corners of the natural world. In one poem Local plovers call- and-answered from the power poles in another night animals' voices rise cantabile falsetto in mock solemnity. She cranes her neck. That Becker is also a musician-composer enriches his poetic brew. emOn Sunday Afternoonsem also contains longer meditations rich in human-often familial-feeling, or poems that lean into more surreal animations, or revisit a remembered Brooklyn washed up on the shoals of the Gowanus. Lucid and musically realized, these poems emerge from w