In his debut chapbook, Excavating the Sky, Konstantin Kulakov labors to relate the unitive spirituality of his Russian background to the fragmentation of a market-driven US society. Whether it is his prior Muslim-Christian relationship, his dance with natural science, or his struggle to expose continued US raciality, Kulakov’s poetry seeks the contradictions in everything, "mixing words to bring-out sparks." At once lyrical and visionary, personal and political, what emerges is a spiritual language that resists the exclusionary tendencies of the 21st century and offers subtle flashes of possibility. Throughout, there is breaking, but there is also unfolding—