The poems in this book inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. In this collection of sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous poems, a lost man wanders among the towns of people who can't remember what they named the children, how to find each other's porches, or whether their buildings are still intact. That's why they need the person with the loupe. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world's harvest is whatever swims too close, the person with the...

"Drop the personal," Alan Feldman's best friend advises. But what else does he have? Feldman takes his title from Zhivago's interpretations of the afterlife: "Your soul, your immortality, your life in others."
In a collection where the dead do speak, Feldman's poems in his first segment, "Self-Portraits," are more likely to be about others than about himself. The segment "Partners" reflects on marriage and divorce, the latter an "uncontested victor over marriage, / the way the flood is champion over the flood plain." In the section "Offshore" Feldman writes about travel to Uruguay, his...