So what if I left language by the pier. Metaphor's a raft, " declares Andrew DuBois as he leads readers through a fractured past and present -- from "slummy memories of streets" to a "a charnelhouse (?) of possible clowns" -- defamiliarizing, critiquing, and satirizing a wide range of conversational forms in the style of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer. Yet, as "lives at time degenerate into victory competitions, " and the poet alternates between searching for an escape from the mundane and accepting that "merely being there together is a dull catastrophe, " we recognize that a formally wry, almost flippant, voice has become caught in language's web. The surfaces of the poems begin to feel like thin ice, a brittle coating over which we skate for as long as it lasts. Danger lurks here: the poet must play the puppet, not the puppeteer and we must surrender, body and soul, into language as element."--