The Magic Kingdom

Poetry. "Russel Swensen's MAGIC KINGDOM is a glass globe, shattered like the one Charles Foster Kane let fall, a sphere of obsession in which the past is a fugue of vanished music and desolate mornings, glamorous and desparate gestures in a city gone liquid and dream-quick with cocaine and sexual promise. This poet knows from the beginning that intoxication ends, and beloved companions scatter and perish; such dicey kingdoms don't come again. But it is his work, his lament and his privilege to place the unfinished past at the center of his bristling, troubled art."—Mark Doty