This, Alan Michael Parker's third collection, is his best. It's brilliant--intellectually rigorous, complex, and musically exciting. Parker's poems are delightful and (at times) funny without resorting to easy, winking irony. His series on the gods--a sort of experimental ars poetica--is at once hilarious and deeply moving, as is "The Librarian's Song," among others.I'm a fan of Alan Michael Parker's first two books--Days Like Prose and The Vandals--but his achievement here is astonishing.