Poetry. Alan Gilbert's much anticipated debut threads desire and loss, image and consumption, memory and hope through a dystopian landscape of war, ecological disaster, and the ruins of empire. As in Dante, love is the guiding principle for a personal and social practice, even if paradise is just as likely to bury it all under a mountain of wreckage. "Alan Gilbert's powerful first collection reads like a verbal superconductor collider, wherein the intractable litter of our times careens though dark space, indifferent to our need to pause or reflect; an additive slippage disintegrates the status quo"—Ann Lauterbach. "These poems are like no others...they seethe and roil and bite and play on through the cold lens of a microscope in the scathing and witty lineage of William S. Burroughs.... An enormous achievement"—Anne Waldman.