From the violence of Tiberius and Edward III to the death of James Cook's Polynesian companion Tupaia, this collection of poems examines a litany of historical contexts, countering the habitual barbarity, selfishness, and stupidity of humans by highlighting their potential. It contrasts grace with atavism, imaginative transcendence with the determinative structures of biology, culture, and belief. Humans, the clever apes, live and die in age-old continents, but behave incontinently. At the collection's core is the role of poetry as revelation of the e |