Somewhere between Some Trees–era John Ashbery and Ange Mlinko, Waters's poised page-length lyrics pull off the difficult trick of making the first person at once immediate and strange: "Odd I had to learn to act natural/ To look as innocent as a beaker/ though less rigid or reproducible." While things seem to be happening, fully spelled-out narratives are hard to come by, though most readers will be content to follow the speaker in "Seeking the oddly beautiful crimp/ In the sinister code/ to decipher it out of existence." This book comes very close.
