Pickled dreams naked

Norman Stock's direct expression of gut-level feelings, surreal fantasies, and riotous humor, invite the reader to experience poetry in a new, more immediate way. The boring posturing of academic poetry is stood on its head by these plain-spoken poems, from the much-anthologized "What I Said," on 9/11, which one textbook study has described as offering "a searing insight into the nature of humanity," to his comic send-ups of the literary world. As in his first book, the prize-winning *Buying Breakfast For My Kamikaze Pilot*, Stock once again lays bare the hypocrisies that surround us with his sardonic wit and commitment to the truth of what we actually feel as opposed to what we are often taught we are supposed to feel.