Poetry. "Claire Bateman's speakers are experts in failure, and they often know how silly they look from a cautious pragmatic perspective. They know they look like misfits, bumbling around in a world of rationally explicable restraints--clumsy, whacked, but undaunted and weirdly cheerful. Like other transcendentalist poets, Bateman is most powerful and moving where she gives pain and folly their due, sustaining her readiness for marvelous breakthrough amid folly and pain. Indeed, her central intuition is that the interaction between two realities, rather than either reality in itself, is what makes life, as well as poetry, terrific"--Mark Halliday, from the foreword.