The latest volume of this dazzling poet"s work, urgent poems in which words, images, ideas, music, and feelings are pushed to their ultimate capacity. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; a Village Voice Favorite Book of 1998. The latest volume of this important and highly original poet"s work is a three-part journey into the pathology of human emotions. In a cascade of language-ordinary speech, preaching, song, banter, erudition-all that is good spirals into regions of horror and grotesque inconsistency with consequences as contemporary as headlines and as eternal as myth. Intense and brilliantly sustained, these poems limn the humane being tested, the plunge into strangeness, and finally recovery, the salvaging of wonder after all.