A kind of "public dreaming" takes place via the music of these poems--a music as likely to visit the long-dead ghosts of the Kwakiutl tribe as Gianni Versace, and as interested in the baby seat of a car as it is in a boxing ring. Building on the critical success of David Rivard's two earlier, award-winning books, "Bewitched Playground" widens both his emotional aperture and formal range. Rivard calls it "my book of domestic voodoo"--not a book "about" having a child, but written out of a life touched by a new intimacy, and tuned-in to an unwilled strangeness, a fluctuating gravity.

Here, the unconscious forces of the imagination intersect with the everyday, in a crossroads at the bewitched playground. These stylistically innovative poems are full of the rediscovery that the world teems with "otherness, " with freshness and surprise.