I’ll have what Steven Shields is having, please.  Yeats’s second coming has nothing on these creation (and destruction) stories.  A chicken wanders the woods and ponders Voltaire.  A young god (God?) makes donut-universes and gets scolded.  A boy becomes a swan and flies over his skeptical audience.  The sky rains tacos.  These poems explore imperfect actual worlds and possible other worlds, the earth-bound and the cosmic, in a dazzling array of voices and scenarios.  Shields pilots flights not of fancy but of curiosity: irreverent and hopeful, deeply philosophical.

—Michael Diebert, author of Life Outside the Set

These poems are wildly creative. Whether dealing with the everyday, quantum physics, or fantasy, they seem to spring from the imagination of a young boy, the knowledge of a scientist, and the craft of a poet, combined. Lucifer makes a couple of appearances along with quarks, donuts, and aliens who look like Walt Whitman. The voice can be sarcastic, funny, or tender – sometimes all at once. With great titles such as “Still Life, With Man in Bunny Costume,” these little stories in frames (sonnets, prose poems, microfiction, free verse, and more) add up to a fascinating bigger picture.

—Karen Paul Holmes, author of No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot.