A rising star in the poetry world, Kunin is also a literary critic and a novelist. His formally innovative work has been described as "tragicomic," and it is with a certain thrill that one realizes his poems have managed to bundle shame with hilarity, high tension with the highly ridiculous, sharp wit with ominous portents. His first book, Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005), was devised as a "value-neutral Paradise Lost" in which the structures of belief, shame, and hierarchy are explored by an agile mind that draws from Hegelian logics, myth, spatial relations and sharp observation of the human. Aaron Kunin grew up in Minneapolis, was educated at Brown, John Hopkins and Duke, and is an...