Poetry. 65.3% urbanity, neoclassical wit, critical detachment, epigrams, and sestinas; 34.7% curses, farts, and terrible jokes. Like modernist poetry, but with adulterations. I am in awe of the range of styles, the wealth of invention. The title is true: this is a living book.--Aaron Kunin
These poems are about as much furious thunder (lightning's or gunpowder's) as the lyric can carry now, well into the 21st century. Ranging, ambitious, messy here, elegant there--they sprawl with winning abandon like poetry's equivalent to a Franzen novel, sacrificing no wit but also no genuine gravitas. Look, they seem to say, at what poetry could do!--Susan Wheeler