The many fans of Booker's previous books, especially TUG, a masterpiece by all counts and accounts, will be even more astonished at his signature acts of defiance here, without which we'd have less hope of breaking the bars of our cage others merely rattle. An added, special gift, one that plants hopes for a better future, is how the poems help us realize "that one day/we'll wake up knowing things." Like the spider on his wall, Booker is "a desperate piece of work/Gone kaput but as precious as the rain." Finally, the answer to "How finished is a thing looking this undone" is PLENTY.

Almost a quarter century after his pioneering work on the iconography of the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979, Hamid Dabashi returns to a precipous collection of revolutionary posters from the pre-revolutionary period to wed them critically to the contemporay social and political causes of our time.