In his impressive third volume, Peter Carlaftes digs into the beauty—and lunacy—of contemporary culture and its tendency to masque and disrupt the sustainability not just of the planet, but human nature itself.

The poems in Life in the Past Lane are both daring and discreet, ranging from full frontal assaults on political and religious cults to tender, discerning, intimate studies of the challenges of self-faith, relationships and maintaining quiet equilibrium in the noisy space of modern life.

Risk-taking and endlessly innovative, Carlaftes offers poems that dare to ask questions to which there is no answer, and to answer the unasked. It looks at the past clear-eyed, without reverence, and studies the place in the road where we are now, weaving cultural and personal memory with the currency that too-often ignores how we arrived. This extraordinary collection, relentlessly accessible, surprises with the depth of poems and the clarity of the thoughts, concepts, and execution that forged them.