Most of the pieces in the collection are prose poems. They vary in mode—essays, anecdotes, list-based fantasias. The prose-poem form not only forgives Bateman’s chief fault—a tendency to explain herself unnecessarily—but provides ample space for her greatest virtue, the deceptively amicable, conversational explication of very odd ideas: an infinitely extended telephone apology; a diamond ring’s progress through a sewer system; or a girl who can shrink down to hide in a cake, “a sucronaut” in a “sugar constellation.”