Nicholas Laughlin

Despite the book s title, these poems are rarely autobiographical and have few straightforward stories to tell. They puzzle over accidents, coincidences, and codes, as they describe journeys and wonders, edging towards a sense of the world s curious strangeness, the complications of what we call history, the contretemps of geography.The poems belong to a hemisphere of the imagination that encompasses the narratives of 19th-century travelers and 20th-century anthropologists, spy movies, astronomical lore, the writings of Saint-John Perse and Henri Michaux, and the music of Erik Satie. They balance on the edge between concealment and revelation, between fascination and comprehension. For these poems, every sentence is a kind of translation, and language is a series of riddles with no solutions, subtly humorous at one phrase, sinister at another, heartbroken at the next. "

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