"Poems of the Known World" comes to us from the paradoxes and harsh juxtapositions of late 20th-century life - the unkempt homeless sleeping beside a smoothness of marble cut from mountains they will never see and used as the facings of buildings they will almost never enter; male and female reaching toward union while memories of the brutality of war pass between them; the recognition by a market futures trader that his life is as vulnerable and circumscribed as that of a frog he had dissected as a student years before.
