Figures for the Ghost: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.)

In Figures for the Ghost, Scott Cairns offers postmodern meditations on the problems of epistemology, interpretation and belief. The collection is distinguished by its implicit proposition that uncertainty (or decenteredness) is a pleasurable state. "In their gestures and in their intent, the poems are religious," says Cairns, "but honestly so. Skirting didacticism, they perform a willing trajectory into the unknown."