But all of that ignores the predominant pleasure of many of these poems. Mong’s acute sensitivity to the sounds and musical effects of language is matched only by his ability to manipulate those effects in fascinating ways. “Blackout” enacts its electric shocks in words, and is well worth quoting in its entirety.

The language here is effortlessly showy. It is a tour-de-force of soundplay, and the verbal effects come nonstop: the drawn-out l’s reined in by t’s in “little blue bolt” followed by the cracks of “shock in the dark,” or the movement from “quiver” to “kindle” or of the lines “to strike / and singe / the sheets: I am a comet streak / or spark.” The very approximate end rhymes grow more exact as the poem continues, and we know that the poet is in control of his language, fashioning jagged lines that buck and chomp at the bit. The poem ends in a recognition of incompletion, the same recognition found in “Vitruvian Man.” We are running in the dark like blind acrobats, and Mong’s work brings us a feeling of madcap exhilaration. His poem echoes the same sense that the world has gone askew that is found in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Emperor of Ice Cream.” It also evokes a similar outcome: to see things as they are, whether they are incomplete, flawed, or beautiful. Mong’s line, “Let the tiki / torches dot the lawns,” provides a variation of Stevens’ “Let the lamp affix its beam.”

The poet’s series of sestinas on Fellini movies puts me in mind of James Tate’s motor-mouth mode and David Foster Wallace’s play with footnotes and riddles; the structure of his sparer verse recalls William Carlos Williams. To say that at times the myriad influences do not seem entirely integrated is to indicate that Mong’s already formidable talents will only deepen and mature. He is, in my opinion, one of the rare talents: a poet whose gift for creating invigorating verbal effects through juxtaposition and enjambment is underpinned by a philosophical mind and an instinct not to take himself too seriously.