“In men’s clothes, / she makes herself / invisible to examine / anatomy at / the slaughterhouse. / She obtains / a police permit / to wear trousers / while she sketches.”

From the opening lines, Margo Taft Stever’s new poem collection leads us deftly inside the nearby unfamiliar. Traveling back in time to an actual historical “lunatic ball,” Stever interweaves a series of closeup and painfully gorgeous glimpses of the world as it is–both natural, and man-made.