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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAR 22, 2010

The deservedly acclaimed Hayes returns in his fourth book with the kinds of sly, twisting, hip, jazzy poems his fans have come to expect, but also with a new somberness of tone and mature caution. You can spend your whole life/ doing no more than preparing for life and thinking/ 'Is this all there is?' warns the book's opening poem. Later, in a book that thinks hard about fatherhood, family, and mortality, Hayes asks, Who cannot think// Our elegies are endless endlessly and the words/ We put to them too often unheard and hurried? Elsewhere, Hayes treats memory with his signature wit: I believe, as the elephant must,/ that everything is punctured by the tusks of Nostalgia. The book also contains a surprisingly effective series of poems based on a form called pecha kucha, which, Hayes explains, is a type of Japanese business presentation in which the presenter must riff on a series of slides or images; Hayes adapts this form by bracketing the title or slide he's riffing on ( The Magic of Magic and The Function of Fiction are two examples) and following with a four- or five-line stanza. The poems free-associate through their triggers, but images and themes satisfyingly resurface. Hayes, now entering mid-career, remains one of our best poets.