The comfortless poetic voices created by Dana Gelinas in this book of epigrams burst before the eye and ear of the reader, invoking the Latin poet Marco Aurelio Marcial, the author of the two most famous and compelling epigrammatic books of Latin poetry: Xenia (Gifts for the friends) and Apoforeta (Gifts for the guests) and she closes it with the poem “Incitato”—Caligula’s horse name—whom the emperor wanted to name as a priest and consul (according to Suetonius). If tyrants have populated and will continue to populate our human experience with terror and death, the sharp and bare verses of Dana Gelinas paint in red hot the disgust that must inspire in us the limitless incompetence and arrogance of the power of untruth and the untruth of the power.

—Rei Berroa

IX

If you look at his wardrobe,

Donald has a nice hood,

a romper that his mommy made for him,

a very cute hooded romper.

Milky Way white;

white as the whitest of gods.

Postscript: Under Trump

tanning was made tax free.

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