More than any living poet I know, Russell Thorburn invites us into the company of recurring characters inhabiting a fully-formed world of the imagination. His work reads, collectively, like a vast, ongoing novel in which we join personalities from John Keats to John Lennon to Marilyn Monroe and get to discover what they are up to these days. In this new book, for example, I was delighted to learn that Keats and his gal Fanny are hiding out in the cold north, safe in an old hotel overlooking Lake Superior. And Thorburn and his readers get to play too, as he has the generosity and talent to write himself and us into this irresistible poetic Elysium (and sometimes Underworld) of his."-Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island