A wonderfully inventive, formally bold long poem from the author of Cigarettes and The Sinking of the Odyadek Stadion. Formal experimentation reaches into the past and seizes conceits, forms and rhythms from the history of poetry, appropriating with a free hand a range of language seldom used by contemporary poets. Yet the poem is absolutely contemporary, especially in its license in pillaging the rich past to furbish the poet's vivid present.


"Long renowned for his masterful and duplicitous fiction, Harry Mathews the poet has been little known until now, making this important and long-overdue collection all the more welcome. His poetry is both bizarre and deeply moving."

--John Ashbery


"Verve, intelligence, fun, plus a serious refurbishment of genres shine from these pages."

--James Merrill


"Best (if not enough) known for his novels, Harry Mathews is also a poet, a most inventive American writer [whose] language makes intimate local structures of pleasure. Like Andres Serrano, Mathews is an artist of body fluids, of portable and compendious oceans. Indeed, the early 17th century underlies his abstract vocabulary, not to say his syntax."

--Donald Hall, Harvard Book Review