Praised as "wonderful, exuberant, unsettling" on its publication in the United Kingdom, Simon Armitage's new collection brings us a vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, and tall tales.All are welcome at this twilit, visionary carnival: the man whose wife drapes a border curtain across the middle of the marital home; the black bear with a dark secret; the woman who arranges giant snowballs in the freezer. "My girlfriend won me in a sealed auction but wouldn't / tell me how much she bid," begins one speaker; "I hadn't meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive," another tells us. The storyteller behind this human tapestry has about him a sly undercover idealism: he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being, at the very least, entirely "genuine in his disbelief." In these startling poems, with their unique cartoon-strip energy and air of misrule, Armitage creates world after world,...words : 17398