On the surface, L. S. Klatt’s poems are airy and humorous—with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub—but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word.

 Under the heat of inquiry, under the pressure of metaphor, the poems in Cloud of Ink liquefy, bend, and serpentine as they seek sometimes a new and sometimes an ancient destination. They present the reader with existential questions as they side-wind into the barbaric; the pear is figured as a “wild boar” and the octopus is “gutted,” yet primal energies cut a pathway to the mystical and the transcendent. The poetic cosmos Klatt creates is loquacious and beautiful, strange and affirmative, but never transparent. Amid “a maelstrom of inklings,” the writer—and the audience—must puzzle out the meaning of the syllabary.

In the United States, where much of the daily discourse appears to be reduced to matters of dollars and cents, the poet is an interloper who traffics where he doesn't belong. L. S. Klatt is vividly aware of this phenomenon. For him, words are musical and versatile, more about play than utility, and he seeks to dislocate language, to freelance and maneuver, to alter common sense on the way to new sense.

The poems in Interloper unsettle frontiers between disparate worlds so that the imagination is given room to roam: pears become guitars, racks of ribs are presented as steamboats, and helicopters transmute into diesel seraphs. The poetry aspires acrobatically in the manner of prayers and pilots, but adventure throughout the book is viewed as precarious and the will to conquest leads to apocalypse and ruin. The interloper wanders through crime scenes and crash sites as he glosses the landscape—at home and not at home with the America of yesterday and tomorrow. In symbols that scat and ricochet, the interloper scores a new song, one that composes—and decomposes—on the page.