Tom Disch’s first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. His serious gift for humour permeates poems by turn lyric and narrative, satirical, rebellious, ribald, uncompromising and honest. Too idiosyncratic and various a poet to belong to any poetic grouping, he is simply, in the late Donald Davie’s phrase, consistently entertaining and intelligent’.

Tom Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1940. He moved to New York, where he still lives, in 1957. A critically acclaimed and award-winning science fiction author (writing as Thomas M. Disch), he has published many novels, collections of short stories and of poetry, as well as children’s fiction and two works of poetry criticism. He has contributed poems regularly to Hudson Review, Light, Paris Review, Poetry (Chicago) and the Times Literary Supplement; he writes reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and others.