The poems of Rebecca Hazelton’s contemporary American fantasyland revel in the constructed realities of movie sets and marriage. Poems reveal the negotiations of power and performance behind closed doors, between the sheets, and in contracts and scripts. The collection’s three parts act out how we present ourselves through counterfeits, ornaments, and distorted self-portraits. Keen, wry, and playful, Hazelton’s poems poke fun at the savagery buzzing underneath life’s slicked-back surfaces and crack the veneer on our most brightly jarring cultural constructions. She confronts our need to constantly adjust our masks to appease impossible standards—and our desperate fear of having our true selves be seen and understood.

Rebecca Hazelton is the author of Fair Copy, Vow, and the chapbook Bad Star, and the coeditor of The Manifesto Project. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Poetry, and the New Yorker. A two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she is an assistant professor of English at North Central College.