Palpable Magic features re-readings and reviews of such late 20th Century poets as Anne Sexton, Larry Levis, Charles Wright, Patricia Goedicke, and Wendell Berry, as well as provides commentaries on poetic craft, the prose poem, and what it means to be a poet.

LaFemina's musings on poetry are fascinating and curious; the re-readings are not old grounds covered in old measures but as poems and books seen fresh, candidly, sometimes irreverently but always respectfully.

LaFemina is a shrewd critic, and these essays cause us to become necessarily inquisitive and curious. He shows his readers, time and again, that poetry is magical, intense, and necessary to our lives.