[True Stories] is centred on Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written, a sequence about present-day torture and the brutality of the past…. At moments, Atwood seems damaged by her own security; unable to shut her eyes on "darkness, drowned history," she knows prison cells and death camps by a recurrent ache of the imagination. Some poems are painful to read, for she doesn't flinch from showing us the methods and effects of evil….

Not all her poems are explicitly political, though many inhabit a borderland between private and public unease. As ever, Atwood moves with brilliant fluency from objects to emotions; her ideas often take shape and force from sharp physical details such as "cooking steak or bruised lips" and "mouthpink light." That famous cool intelligence can be sardonic with a vengeance…. In True Stories, however, the abrasiveness is subdued by tenderness, a surprising vulnerability...