Trailer Z 172 ..."A Poet Is Possessed," or, How My Book Came to Be and Why It Is So Weird

This sequence of fifty 14-line poems uses the Zapruder Film of President Kennedy's murder as a prism through which to view America and the world. Refracted rays touch on crime and punishment; guilt and responsibility; charisma and love; the dying victim's experience during the stretched-out seconds of his violation and death; and the dark world of war profiteering, narco-traffic, and deceit where the facts of power determine history. Epic tradition (e.g., Homer, Dante, Milton) shares these pages with science, religion, and popular culture, now funny and now horrifying. Limousine, Midnight Blue is a haunted book about a haunted film of an event whose hungry ghosts still walk the American unconscious, rattling their chains louder every year.

"Ovid himself might have taken notice of this volume. It's one thing to turn a woman into a tree, another more advanced thing to transform fifty frames of the Zapruder film into as many sonnets. Limousine, Midnight Blue is a radical display of poetry's ability to freeze time, to catch fugitive —and here, disputed—moments in the amber of form." —Billy Collins