Based on Actual Events

Taking its inspiration from Melville's famous line "If man will strike, strike through the mask," *Based on Actual Events* punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a "a realist in fabulist clothing," Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a nostalgia for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement from the world. With each burst of invention and stylistic high-spiritedness ("So we reverse engineered the awesome and all we got / was this lousy poesy"), *Based on Actual Events* adds up to be Moore's best book yet.