Poetry. "Michael Ives's cunningly quarried prose plinths are stippled with the comedy and cruelty of Marcel Duchamp's and Raymond Roussel's wildest inventions. Move over, machines celibataires THE EXTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE has arrived, and it's hummin' " John Ashbery. "These narratives are intensely, wildly logical, sensual, humorous, transgressive catapults into the particulars of an exquisite knowledge for which you can't know you are being prepared. The high-wire pleasures and exhilarations of reading are happily reawakened by this brilliant, surprising book" Joan Retallack."