Pickled Dreams Naked

Norman Stock's direct expression of gut-level feelings, surreal fantasies, and riotous humor, invite the reader to experience poetry in a new, more immediate way. The boring posturing of academic poetry is stood on its head by these plain-spoken poems, from the much-anthologized "What I Said," on 9/11, which one textbook study has described as offering "a searing insight into the nature of humanity," to his comic send-ups of the literary world. As in his first book, the prize-winning Buying...