Poetry. David Giannini's poems are as intricate as a hall of receding mirrors. Readers enter into these elemental, historical, and phenomenological poems only to find themselves indeed strangely blended, on an unexpected ride that skirts closely to revelation. Their extravagant playfulness--carried by rhymes, half-rhymes, inversions, and puns--takes us through logical conundrums, fables, and myths only to collide with a self relentlessly looking outwards and inwards. One never is sure if it's the reader, the poet, or the work that is 'scrambling up to grab you, not / by the throat, by the butt of a joke.' Interspersed amongst the humor and complexity--and for that reason all the more powerful--are poems that harness a striking spareness in response to contemporary landscapes of harshness, brutality, displacement, and grief.--Janet MacFadyen