Sixty-five new poems take their place beside forty-five poems published in Marcus’s previous two books. Employing and many times parodying the structures of discourse by which we have communicated our sense of the world through the ages, Marcus re-examines the notions on which the human species has understood its place in the universe. In the process, he has created his own cosmology—a cosmology by turns humorous, satirical, poignant, and always compassionate in revealing our beliefs, foibles, hopes, and contradictory actions.

Morton Marcus is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel, The Brezhvev Memo. A film historian and critic as well as a poet, Marcus taught film and literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, until his retirement.