Poetry. M.L. Berman writes sensuous portraits eloquently revealing distant places, remarkable characters and fanciful worlds. The poems in this collection range from the vernacular to the obscure displaying subtle shades of experience and ideas at times nested one within another like the ingenuity of a Russian matryoshka doll. His work is influenced by an eclectic mix of film, Russian literature, the mad Frenchmen Artaud and Celine, the imagists, dada, as well as numerous American and English poets of the forties, fifties, and sixties.