The Little Book of Guesses takes place in a 21st-century world where we’ve “accustomed ourselves to our customized dogs” and “honed the idea of ideas there in the obstacle race / that’ll never catch up.” But while it’s a world we’re not unfamiliar with—“in the New Age tourism is the answer”—Gallaher’s turn of speech is at once unique and exact, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Serving as our escort through scenes including “The War President’s Afternoon Tea” and “A Moment in the Market of Moments,” Gallaher offers us several guidebooks: “to the Afterlife,” “to When Things Were Better,” and a “Pocket Guide to Some Foreign Country.” Even as these poems guess, they are confident in the form and lyricism. Abundant with comedy, they contain more than a dose of irony and cynicism, and still find room for the quiet anger of frustration, of knowing that what seems most surreal about this world often turns out to be reality itself.

JOHN GALLAHER is the author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls and co-editor of The Laurel Review. His poetry has recently been published in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Field, jubilat, The Journal, and Ploughshares. He holds graduate degrees from Texas State University and Ohio University and lives in rural Missouri.