Poetry. A book-length narrative poem, or a novella-in-verse if you prefer, HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC is a novel-poem with a literary sci-fi bent, a shadow-text to Oedipus written in a style that is up-to-the-minute. With wit, dynamism, and cutting senses of urgency and humor, Iowa Prize winner Peter Jay Shippy tells the tale of Isaac Makepeace Watt, a melancholy man living in a Thebes that is much like contemporary America. The House of Cadmus still rules (and will fall), but they only appear in the poem as media white noise. Isaac's concerns are personal, his father's illness and his own moral decrepitude. There are talking monkeys, plagues, oracles, and nano-robots-you know, the usual agoramania.

''Ah, writ happens.'' Like the con men who rely on thieves' Latin to ply their trade, the poems in Peter Jay Shippy's award-winning collection don't play well with other poems. They are difficult. They rave. They are unsettling and blunt. They crash cars and ride tsunamis and hitch rides on tugs. They also provide a contemporary, ironic, and tender view of America, all the while layering wordplay, cleverness, and sentiment. Shippy's narrators ''dance like night writing''; they ''witness the reverse / side of actions'' and ''take a walk on the wing''; they feel ''nothing but articulation'' and attach ''our planet to the highest branch''; they ''have a good feeling about most birds, and trust / that they are a friend to man.'' In other words, their condition is Beckettian, but they speak like one of Sam Shepherd's dusty road angels.