Turning bare description into a luxuriance, The Known World looks at the complex relationship of past and present, creating energetic juxtapositions between different historic periods to envision life at the end of our own century.

Don Bogen's latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts--history, power, the personal and the social--that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching...