Pushing against the boundaries of what poetry might be, Alison Glenny's The Farewell Tourist is haunting, many-layered and slightly surreal. In "The Magnetic Process" sequence, a man and a woman inhabit a polar world, adrift in zones of divergence, where dreams are filled with snow, icebergs, and sinking ships. Their scientific instruments and observations measure a fragmented and uncertain space where conventional perspectives are violated. In a series of histories--of the Atmosphere, of the Honeymoon--footnotes reference vanished texts.

By turns mysterious, ominous and evocative, they represent connections to an obscured narrative of disintegration and icy melancholy.