What magical message is the snowflake trying to bring to the general, and to the world? In a time of violent military solutions to global problems, this illustrated allegory by a leading poet has a particular, powerful resonance. He is ashamed and pretends not to see it, but eventually he discovers that everyone in his army has a similar problem.

One day the little general sees a giant snowflake hovering in his garden and realizes he is suffering from a disease of the imagination. The sections of Modern Life that tend toward something deeper, that have a unity of tone and that have received some critical attention as poems that successfully engage the modern life of the title (The Future of Terror and Terror of the Future) are also populated with line-stacks, resulting in poems with little syntactic variation. The little general’s soldiers include Sergeant Samantha, who is very tall and wishes the general would pay more attention to her, and Lieutenant Lyle, an imaginative fellow who always seems to get into trouble.

Every day he and his troops practice battle formations while the Dreamers, the opposing army, play strange, peaceful games.

In this compelling tale, there is a little general who heads an army called the Realists. (Oct.In this compelling tale for children and adults alike, the poet Matthea Harvey collaborates with artist Elizabeth Zechel to create a powerful, resonant allegory for these times of violent military solutions to global problems. A few short, lineated poems punctuate the blocks of prose: “World, I'm no one/ to complain about you.” Harvey continues to match her unique sensibility with subjects that matter her poems are both empathic and delightful. Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry: Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine. The backbone of the collection is a pair of sequences-titled “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future”-that explore those two increasingly loaded words using a clever alphabetical system with surprisingly haunting results: “We were just a gumdrop on the grid.” Prose poems bookending the sequences present a fable about a lonely robot (“When Robo-Boy feels babyish, he has the option of really reverting”) a study of appetite (“Ma gave Dinna' Pig his name so that no-one would forget where that pig was headed”) an explanation of how the impossibility of mind-reading led to love (“Even when they press their ears or mouths or noses together, the skull wall is still in the way”) and an unlikely dinner ritual (“rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside”). No One Will See Themselves in You (illustrated by Doug McNamara). Matthea Harvey, born 1973, lives and works in New York. The verse and prose poems of this third collection by Harvey is rife with her signature wit (“the factory puffs its own set of clouds”), darkened by an ominous sense of fearfulness in a post-9/11 world, which the poems' seeming levity tries to combat.

Modern Life by Matthea Harvey