Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac

      Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

      When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

      Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

       This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

      Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

      GEORGE SANTAYANA

      Contents

        Cover

        Title Page

        Note to Reader

       from Dangerous Life (1989)

      1  The News (A Manifesto)

      2  First Job/Seventeen

      3  Dangerous Life

      4  The Revelation

       from The Body Mutinies (1996)

      1  How Western Underwear Came to Japan

      2  Skin

      3  Inseminator Man

      4  Tripe

      5  At St. Placid’s

      6  The Roots of Pessimism in Model Rocketry, the Fallacy of Its Premise

      7  The Body Mutinies

      8  Kilned

      9  Women Who Sleep on Stones

      10  Compulsory Travel

      11  Limits

      12  Needles

      13  Monorail

      14  Cairn for Future Travel

       from The Oldest Map with the Name America (1999)

      1  Beige Trash

      2  Foley

      3  Air Guitar

      4  Pomegranate

      5  Crash Course in Semiotics

      6  Serotonin

      7  Lament in Good Weather

      8  The Oldest Map with the Name America

      9  Home

      10  The Salmon underneath the City

      11  The Ghost Shirt

       from Luck Is Luck (2005)

      1  To My Big Nose

      2  Languedoc

      3  The Crows Start Demanding Royalties

      4  On the Destruction of the Mir

      5  Le deuxième sexe

      6  The Floating Rib

      7  Original Sin

      8  The Cardinal’s Nephews

      9  White Bird/Black Drop

      10  On the High Suicide Rate of Dentists

      11  Freshwater and Salt

      12  In the Confessional Mode, with a Borrowed Movie Trope

      13  Fubar

      14  Bulletin from Somewhere up the Creek

      15  Urban Legend

      16  A Simple Camp Song

      17  from Book of Bob

      18  My Eulogy Was Deemed Too Strange

      19  Conscription Papers

      20  Night Festival, Olympia

      21  Eulogy from the Boardwalk behind the KFC

      22  Shrike Tree

      23  Chum

       from Inseminating the Elephant (2009)

      1  Virtue Is the Best Helmet

      2  Found Object

      3  Rebuttal

      4  A Romance

      5  from Notes