Since first appearing in Late Crossing in the late Nineties, Anne-Marie Fyfe’s life studies have focused increasingly on the disconcerting underside of small-town and suburban banality, on the underlit corners of apartments, waiting rooms, underpasses, on doppelgangers and stand-ins, on clandestine, undercover operations and escapades. So many cherished objects, long forgotten or only half-recollected, so many places on the verge of mattering, so many lives spent rehearsing for moments that never arrive: Understudies brings together new poems of optimism and isolation, of assumed and confused identities, with some of the poems from The Ghost Twin, Tickets from a Blank Window and Late Crossing that first brought readers into this world of lives at once chaotic and oddly consolatory that lie below placid surfaces.