Poems of a nearly forgotten China caught in abject poverty. A long sonnet sequence full of jokes and puns, inspired by the transcendental energies of the gardens of Kyoto. A sequence of tanka-like images celebrating America's western mountains, deserts and shores. A longer work detailing a ten-year-old's attempts to understand his uncle's death in Vietnam. A semiautobiographical epic expressing the inner life of a man caught in a savage ice storm. Jinzhou, Kyoto, Baltimore is an inspiring, forthright book, which never shrinks from taing the contradictions of the inner life and resolving them through the art of poetry. -- Scott Francis