Poetry. Tom Breidenbach's verse follows two histories, one personal and the other historical, that come together at a common end in the book's middle, providing a sense of circularity, as indicated by the twin ouroboroi on its two covers. THE WICKED CHILD shows a cutting, violent, and fragmented human existence; it can be viewed almost as a premise for its epic twin, IX XI, which, tracing this violence to the tradition of Classical Antiquity, maintains the first book's folksy attitude in the midst of its own mythographic calculus. By the books' ends, we see both the random and the ritualistic violence of this human condition tied to the mysterious legacies of man's and the gods' Empires throughout the ages.