Flickering Kingdoms evokes the wider social order as an interacting system on the societal, group and individual levels. In closed and open forms, these linguistically playful, condensed, phonetically rich, jazzily rhythmic, and at times hard-hitting poems balance concrete, precise language with controlled ambiguity. Often-in such poems as "The Moonlight Hitchhiker," "Found on a Fallen Conscript," "The Unseasonable," "Somebody Fished from a Swimming Pool," or "The Down-home Harrower"- speakers from various places in society offer their stories, a number of which fail to relate the entire...