Poetry. A beautiful, formidably intelligent yet profoundly inviting book, Alex Houen's much-anticipated RING CYCLE brilliantly orchestrates its many motifs across poems that move from the metaphysical to the intimate to the droll sometimes within one poem. Houen is a poet of lavish linguistic sensuality, his poems vibrating with his attunement to fissures within the self, between lovers; salutes to friends; romantic skirmish; the ambient dread of our moment. Houen's brilliantly mash-upping mind encompasses pirated DVDs, Dryden and Alexander McQueen, conceits poetic and contemporary and untimely and unheimlich. A book of enormous range, simultaneously lush and austere, RING CYCLE tracks the perversities of erotic and filial suspension alongside questions of conscience and aesthetics.