Debt crises have placed strains not only on the European Union's nascent federal system but also on the federal system in the United States. Old confrontations over fiscal responsibility are being renewed, often in a more virulent form, in places as far flung as Detroit, Michigan, and Valencia, Spain, to say nothing of Greece and Cyprus. Increasing the complexity of the issue has been public sector collective bargaining, now a component of most federal systems.

The attendant political controversies have become the debate of a generation. Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler have assembled...

A sequence of short, startling poems of imagined translations

Lacunae, Daniel Nadler's debut collection, is an exercise in poetics of vital import. In it, Nadler imagines himself into those moments of unintelligibility--blank spaces in time--where constraint and expansion coincide. When faced with such ellipses, like where a few decisive hieroglyphs have worn off a wall, he infers and reconstructs the flora, fauna, and pleasures of an ancient world.

"Like the wind that gusts coastal pines toward the water / sleep bends me toward my lover / and I cannot...