A tour de force, a book-length poem, embracing a wide variety of poetic and prose forms, to tell the story of Harry Houdini.

Steven Price's Houdini knows better than most the limitations of life, having bent the efforts of a lifetime to transcending them, and having failed. Ah, but his thinking! Or rather Steven Price's thinking with and through him. "Make it muscular and be apparent in it," says Houdini's archivist/advisor, "words are also escapes." So they are in a book with the sinew of Anatomy of Keys. The facts of Houdini's life are here - immigration to America, youth, circus stint, fame, that notorious life-ending punch - but the facts are the spine of a deep and ardent meditation on what is. In poems of astonishing technical virtuosity, Steven Price reads Houdini's world and our own in compellingly original ways.

Swivel-and-snick sputter of a turned handle.
Bald knob bare in the palm. The torpid click
And calm take of springs triggered far within.

I'd set myself t