Inspired by the spirit and approach of Bertolt Brecht's "Manual of Piety," the poems of "Laughing Cult" often employ the structures of ballads, folksongs, and other traditional forms to create miniature sketches marked by romantic ambiguity, occultism, science fiction, and quirky angst. As cool in tone as a Lee Konitz solo and as lacking in affect as pop art, this first collection includes numerous poems that have appeared on the "Exquisite Corpse" website. To shape something aesthetically charged out of the spent elements and enervated thoughts of a slowly failing society: that's the...