Easy to like and easy to lose yourself in, Brent Cunningham’s second book turns out to be hard to get your head around. It’s a book-length poem, or a verse sequence, that ostensibly records the apocalyptic revelation of one not-especially-literate thirteen-year-old boy. As he has seen on his visionary journey, the world as we know it will end (or perhaps has already ended), and we will live in a new dispensation governed not by earthly values (family, safety, education, money) but by the previously incomprehensible sun, under whose power the boy pens imitations, or travesties, of William Blake. “You ask for prophecies— / I give you prophecies,” one section begins; “tomorrow the stars will go out / darkness will prowl the parks & museums … until the Rocks themselves / run up to us like spaniels // now what will the statues be FOR? / what will be their MODELS?”

It’s not a bad question, translated out of vision-speak: if we are supposed to model ourselves on adults, who are those adults’ models? Why have adults made such a hash of this life, indenturing us to “documents, itineraries, measurements, / schedules, timings, forms”? Such questions pervade the book, but it would be a mistake to see here a consistent or articulate critique of the bourgeois rat race: along with these heartfelt, clear protests against grown-ups’ rules come almost-unintelligible visions of “the third largest City of the Sun” and the end of the Earth.

—Stephen Burt