Bob Perelman’ s latest book of poetry, Jack and Jill in Troy, makes use of the rapid clarity of Homer and the elemental incantations of nursery talk to create a compelling array of poems that speak to our present moment with tragic humor and urgent, skeptical directness. A rather R-rated version of Jack and Jill appear in some poems, as if a worldly-wise Mother Goose is addressing young and old in the same breath. In other poems the world of the Iliad appears— permanent war economy, never-finished gender negotiations, continual power disputes, absolute hierarchies arbitrarily enforced— but both these nursery matters and the ancient epic trappings are brought forward to provide a wide-angle frame onto our own situation. The poems in Jack and Jill in Troy are immediately legible, suggestive, and surprising.