Bewitched Playground

A kind of "public dreaming" takes place via the music of these poems—a music as likely to visit the long-dead ghosts of the Kwakiutl tribe as Gianni Versace, and as interested in the baby seat of a car as it is in a boxing ring. Building on the critical success of David Rivard's two earlier, award-winning books, Bewitched Playground widens both his emotional aperture and formal range. Rivard calls it "my book of domestic voodoo"—not a book about having a child, but written out of a life tou...