Taking their inspiration from the alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are both humble and exotic. Highly ambitious and astonishingly beautiful, this collection deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in emotionally poignant ways.
These poems capture the way events reverberate and repeat across time and place: between the seventeenth-century tulip trade and the twentieth-century AIDS epidemic, for example; or even between a housekeeper, a Vermeer painting, and that day’s episode of Oprah. Like any good atlas, this collection plots intersections: of love, death, history, art, and desire.
