David Beach’s first collection of prose sonnets, Abandoned Novel, won the $65,000 IIML Prize in Modern Letters for emerging writers. He is now a retired mail sorter. This next book features prominently two urban locations not often juxtaposed, Troy and Te Aro. A chapter-by-chapter sonnet translation of The Iliad, and a sequence set in the Wellington inner city suburb, play off each other in a work where the line between the real and the imagined becomes as blurred as the poetry/prose divide.