Fall Foliage Called Bathers and Dancers

"My poems are often dreams; my dreams are poems," Alexandria Peary tells us in her marvelous first book. These poems describe a world resembling out own, beneath which she finds endless off-kilter surprise and beauty. "Outside," she writes in one in one startling moment, "the driftwood struggled like arms & legs" and, later, a recorded voice "looks just like a piece of tinfoil lying in the sun / in which you could go swimming." I've long admired Alexandria Peary's intelligence, her evocative skills, and her gift for discovering in the everyday such dreamlike, frequently frightening, moments.