This is Ernest Yates’s eighteenth volume of poems, and the fifteenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets.

Maybe our surroundings come into being as we experience them, as in fiction. Maybe that’s the way a city is built―the way a story unfolds in narrative, character, scene. In this poetic novella, the female narrator is a professional investigator of fraud, who is sent on a mission that involves her in fantasy―a volatile, perilous dream of the city. Her experiences lead her to become increasingly aware of the tangled relations between poetry and fiction, art and nature, beauty and dust.