Jonathan Clarkas poems in Caged Rats Dream of Mazes are the collective musings of the poet wandering through an American landscape of the soul submerged in all but forgotten mythologies desperate to be made new. He constructs a distinctive poetic tone that is fluid and often lyrical, subverting the deeper significance of symbolisms and double meanings of words within the context of the poems. He presents hard sought wisdom of sages side by side with anarchistic passions of youth to arrive at a perception of beauty that transcends form, and is as prevalent in a plastic bag tossed by wind as in the ancient sayings of divine beings.