As most of us know, the world we live in keeps making surrealism feel more and more like a depiction of the way things actually are. This is everywhere evident in Denise R. Baker's fine "Eat the Apple," a book that keeps finding language for its convictions, which are fierce, but not without humor. Throughout, there's a visceral edginess, and over-the-topness, that succeeds in rendering what feels like the condition of a particular life, and, by extension, the world that surrounds it. Strong poems here, the real stuff. -Stephen Dunn