There's a precision to the language and storytelling in Evans Lansing Smith's haunting and provocative "mystery in verse" Middleburg that I deeply admire. Told in skillfully constructed Sapphic stanzas, these tales draw us with immediacy into the observed historical world of a family in crisis-most significantly, the poet's suicidal mother and demise of matriarchs before her. Against a fraught but lively pastoral of genteel Middleburg, Virginia,...