Selected Poems by Ben Mazer (paperback)

Now he is a traveller, anonymous and haunted by a problematic past, “in a strange country”; now a jailbird leading a prison break; then a spy in exile, “handled by the handler’s handler” in an attractive mountain village with a faintly European feel (are there villages in the U.S.?), who finds himself reading the local newspaper backwards, presumably for secret code, and winds up experiencing a wild banquet as a vision of a mass descent into hell; and then again he speaks as a Welsh king, alienated but coming to grips with his hereditary royalty, his “divine rights.” Court and courtship, high expectations and high standards of sentiment and decorum, manifest themselves, not without a delicious irony, in this body of sophisticated yet moving 21st-century verse, much of which has an adventurist, experimental edge to it.

—Philip Nikolayev, from the preface

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