Selected from his first two books, Storm over Hackensack (1985) and Earthquake Weather (1989), which have not previously been published in Britain, and other early publications, these poems exhibit the qualities that have established Kleinzahler as one of America's most distinctive and original poets. He is the edgy trickster of the city's inner and outer weather, its tiny narrative and its refusals to tell a straight story, all overheard in mysterious verbal close-up.