The Strange Years of My Life

Despite the book’s title, these poems are rarely autobiographical and have few straightforward stories to tell. They puzzle over accidents, coincidences, and codes, as they describe journeys and wonders, edging towards a sense of the world’s curious strangeness, the complications of what we call history, the contretemps of geography. The poems belong to a hemisphere of the imagination that encompasses the narratives of 19th-century travelers and 20th-century anthropologists, spy movies, ast...