He can't remember his own name. Along the banks of the river Wye, mistaken for, alternately, Peter Pan and someone's father, he ponders the water, talks to a girl named Wendy, tries to remember what dreams may have come, loses all hunger, watches infomercials, occasionally considers changing his clothes, reads Finnegans Wake, pretends to have read Gravity's Rainbow, and has every intention of fantasizing about sex eventually, all the while nagged by the sensation that he's really somewhere else.

50 representative poems by Barry Smolin, selected from the years 1988-2010.

God, wrongly thinking himself to be invisible, is arrested for walking around the streets of West L.A. naked, though he is ultimately condemned by a tribunal of clerics not for public indecency but rather for the blasphemous belief in his own divinity. God is sentenced to eternal imprisonment in a dungeon and chooses to turn the utter darkness into a template for the creation of new universes by thinking them into being. In the course of his ruminations, various details from his own blurry past creep into his divine intentions, calling into question the nature of what he is, where he is, and...

Volume 1 of Barry Smolin's trilogy The Miranda Complex follows the digressive mind of 18-year-old Lance Atlas as he sits at the La Brea Tar Pits, midway through the summer of 1979, after having run into Miranda Savitch at a party the night before. The encounter provokes a swirl of kaleidoscopic memories, both sacred and profane, set against a cultural backdrop that includes an adolescent-eye view of the politics, film, literature, and, especially, music of the era, as well as a mythic rendering of Los Angeles in the 1970s. By turns raunchy and awkward and neurotic, Lance's narration...

In Volume 2 of Barry Smolin's trilogy The Miranda Complex, Lance Atlas is still sitting at the La Brea Tar Pits midway through the summer of 1979 after having run into Miranda Savitch at a party the night before. Here he focuses on a year that spans the summer of 1976 to the summer of 1977, a year of new awakenings and massive distractions, the fulcrum upon which everything balances and against which everything is measured. Los Angeles is once again the backdrop and the musical soundtrack is vintage cool-nerd. This time 'round, Lance is willing to lose it all, himself included. New friends...