The political and social events that made news in the early part of the twenty-first century left little about which to feel rapturous. Perhaps, however, these events lend an even greater urgency to the message in Biele's poem. A person needs diligently to seek out joy in the microcosm of everyday life because the world at large is a difficult place in which to find it.

In America and across the globe, the dominant stories of 2002 were the ongoing war against terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere following the devastating events of September 11, 2001, and the build-up of tensions between the United States and Iraq over the possibility of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Heavy bombing raids eventually crumbled the Taliban in Afghanistan and flushed out al Qaeda terrorists hiding in the region, but their leader Osama Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. In...