M. Travis Lane’s poetry has always been diverse: variously serious, silly, melancholy, cheerful, meditative, witty, philosophical, enigmatic, colloquial, intimate, simple, complex. Asked “What kind of poetry do you write? What do you write about?”, she has replied, accurately, “all kinds” and “anything” — calling her collections “eclectic miscellanies” and refusing to be nailed down by the critics’ need for tidiness. She shifts easily from lyric to monologue to epigram to song to riddle, drawing inspiration equally from the natural world and the world of art and imagination. Though her concerns are often feminist, environmental, civic, and political, her poems transcend such labels. And no matter what form an individual poem takes, there is something in the voice that makes it instantly recognizable as hers: a distinctive musical cadence, a groundedness in nature (nature not just appreciated but intimately observed, known, named), an immediacy of thought and emotion, a compassionate humanity, a questioning spirit. Crossover, Lane’s fifteenth collection, is a continuation of one poet’s exploration of the world and of her inner world, shared with us in the conviction that the spaces we inhabit overlap and connect.