Brink’s book seems devoted to the dynamics of alienation and its ways of producing strange intimacies. Cold, confusing distance generates a fascinating aura of feeling with and feeling for the situations in these poems: as “Recent History” puts it, “Now we know each other through these inklings/ staining our thoughts with wonder.” The first poem, for example, establishes a speaker demanding care to avoid dangers in a walk. T he last line states as the purpose of such caution the ability to “enjoy the jaunt without a care.” Distance from one’s environment provides the key to a sense of freedom within it. “Marine Shadow: after Ashbery” proposes that “A sense of doom filled us with hope one mangrove at a time.” Brinks’ world seems to be a site in which herring “feed themselves to seals.” Compelling and disturbing accuracy demands efforts to come to terms with a totality that has no care for our efforts to construct it (Hegel be damned): trembling little fingers silencing cymbals sift melodies off shuffled notes never nameable, vertical, not to send you maybe a nudge—aperture loosening the long shot what we don’t know— closer then, though learning nothing, holding it. Boal said it and you decorated it never to get to it … I could not avoid the sense that in reading Brink we are engaging an Ashbery hardened by living in a new almost impenetrable America. There is the same ability to hear a language of feeling within or because of the poet’s distance, and, in the last and best poem in the volume, there is the unfolding of a prose mode of description that highlights the lyrical sensibility. That sensibility wants to embrace the affective energies in the states rendered as aspects of a struggle to take in the whole scene with a sanity-producing aura of amusement. More precisely, the poem is based on the problem of integrating past, present, and future by a speaker who ix cannot stop talking. Language proves marvelously effective at description, while being painfully ineffective at the work of making coherent wholes. Talking becomes the paradigm for being “here” and “not here” at the same time—a condition by which Brink seems to want to add a dramatic intensity to Ashbery’s mask of playful freedom. T hen the volume adds two brilliant diversions. “The Threepenny Space Opera” is a short sci-fi play based on Gay and Brecht but obsessed by what the body becomes in future conditions when medical science rules decision- making. The pain of identifying with the victims of this science, the beggars perhaps, becomes inseparable from the joy involved in identifying with the author’s inventiveness. Finally, there is a ten-minute play that begins in mockery of academic publishing and spreads to make ridiculous and yet necessary the voices that engage in shouting as their means of coping with domestic situations. This engagement comprises banal but ultimately painful discourse about the raising of children. This play ends with the cast singing their quarrels, not unlike what this reader felt by the conclusion of the book. —Charles Altieri