"In an as-though-ancient age, ours, a father tightens his belt: money has rendered nature nothing but pure value, and poetic speech now lives, like next-to-nothing, in the mouth. Mark Levine's Travels of Marco is eerie and tough; stopping just short of elegy, his lyrics disgorge a feeling they're too strong to name, like poems written by neglected mechanics, or by capital's mechanisms of--this time I'll write 'regret,' though the market disallows it. Can a market be addressed? How about a future? Levine's father-speaker rhymes like George Herbert & prays like a man who knows better, singing his way through the disused industries & repurposed traditions of a land a lot like this one. These poems make me sad, they make me laugh, they kind of kill me. Do I understand them? I don't know. They haunt me."-Ariana Reines.