John Terpstra chronicles the unfolding of our everyday lives with a playfulness and easy intimacy reminiscent of poets like Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy, his conversational style belying his careful control of language. Whether he’s exploring the spiritual or the temporal, the present or the past, the animate or the inanimate, Terpstra approaches his subjects with a mix of curiosity and empathy, attuned to how the right words can “begin innocently enough / to thread through the fabric of our lives.”