In the Harvard Review, critic Christopher Bock writes that "...Four Way Books is known for taking risks with aesthetically challenging and important work, and Tobin seems more ambitious than many of his contemporaries...." Second Things is Daniel Tobin's fourth book of poems, and his second collection with Four Way Books, with a third forthcoming in 2010. Following 2005's The Narrows, which traces an Irish-American boy-to-manhood in lush poems reminiscent of both Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, Second Things evinces a tone that is wholly new.