The Deathbed Playboy

Dacey here ranges widely in tones, strategies and forms, a diversity appropriate for one who characteristically meditates on American identity. In these poems, Dacey winds together many strands - our national pop culture, the vagaries of human discourse, death, and sexuality - and frames them in a narrative as comic as it is plangent. Surprises in the book include cameo appearances by George Bush and Florence Nightingale as well as a take on J. S. Bach that owes something to the Keystone Cops.