Meet me at the lighthouse

Author of a dozen titles of poetry, criticism, and translation, Gioia is best known as a proponent of New Formalism, a poetic movement of the 1990s intended to revitalize the widespread use of familiar forms and conventional rhyme schemes, evident in a sonnet-like ode to a luna moth: "baneful vagrant from the stormy skies, / Your broad wings marked with two ferocious eyes." Memory and nostalgia serve as prominent themes throughout the book, often treated with shrugs of humor. One speaker fondly recalls an expedition to a "volcano's sulphurous perimeter," where the volcano now has a café, and the "cities you revisit are populated by strangers / dressed like American teenagers." But Gioia just as easily turns a critical eye to the past and uses alliterative levity to skewer even a figure as sacrosanct as Baudelaire, "memorious and metrical" though he may be, since "Lost is the life of languor and longueurs." A ballad about Jesús Ortiz, the poet's great-grandfather, ties together history, memory, and Gioia's Mexican American ancestry.