For five decades Albert Goldbarth has been astonishing readers with the erudition, wit, lyric invention, wisdom, and depthless humanity of his prolific writing. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry twice and has been awarded the Mark Twain Prize for humor in poetry, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honors. He mixes complex ideas, wildly dissimilar objects and facts, detailed descriptions, striking lyricism, puns, coinages, and jargons. In his review in Slant , Eric McHenry wrote, "in spite of this omnivorousness, the poems aren't just big maximalist messes. Synthesis is Goldbarth's goal and his gift."