Original, jarring, and unforgettable, here is the latest collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Shane Book.

The author of the acclaimed 2014 collection, Congotronic, returns with urgent, forceful, and energetic new poems. Once again, Shane Book's poems take readers around the globe and showcase his talent for layering voice, diction, and rhythm in a staggeringly original and innovative way.


The Rio Communiqué

Gusts thwacked tarps. Meat smells ricocheted
plank to post. We gave up as we can, to another goal:
green fruit. No way to know at that very moment
a marauding group with a megaphone

filed toward the Candomblé sector, throwing political shadows
like the Mont Ste. Marie snow-making machine noise
twisting narrowly past boulders, ice shelves--
steep banked ice shelves too savage for anything but

caterpillar treads--the sound's angle tipped up on its sharpest edge
each pine needle felt as winter's advent
but also, the clarity that months and months of silence
had ended battering every feather, signaling the strangest

permanence. No snow in this part of the hemisphere,
we remember how to use the bowl of teeth, the tealeaf headdress. Still,
the specter shuffles closer, farther, waiting, wending like a wasp,
a field of wasps, unfinished, pointing a way.