Levi Rubeck’s poems teem with tiny surrealisms, utterances that appear with the calm of logic and the twang of dream: “Rabies is the fairy godmother of my friendly ghost,” he writes, and “the parasite of my parasite is my friend.” The three long poems in Lunar Flare make a particularly 21st-century, self-interrogatory weave of image and diction that is Western and deliciously, embarrassingly suburban: “I’m better with a grand slam breakfast in me.” The texture of this weave is rough with Rubeck’s singular wit –”Headstones are teeth in the gums of North Dakota” – and with lines that could have walked straight out of an after-hours bar in a one-horse Prairie village: “I know a lunatic who walked towards doubt.”

TK