"The Sack of Rome might be taking place in Lower Manhattan, and Kevin Prufer applies the fall of that empire to the reader's world. His subject is wreckage, whether of automobiles or urban life. When past and present conflate, the resonance is painful. Is it possible any longer to use the image of a burning city in a poem without calling up September 11? Exactness, rightness of image, phrase, word, and line inform the lyric voice at the heart of poems such as 'Claudius Adrift,' where a protean contemporary speaker, shifting into the emperor's voice, says, 'And one by one, the windows / grinned into flame. The library swayed on its pillars, groaned / as the roof fell through into glitter and cloud. / / I have always loved the grand moment, / the great, abstracted / dying off, when the city collapses and trees blaze.' The book's themes accrue, concluding with a stunning and image that unmistakably refers to the present: 'People kept leaping out of windows. / / The air was full of businessmen, / their red ties streaming behind their necks.'" Reviewed by Karen Kevorkian, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)