Matthea Harvey's "Modern Life" introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world. Her prose pieces and lyrics examine the divided, halved self in poems about centaurs, ship figureheads, and a robot boy. Throughout, Harvey's signature wit and concision show us the double-sided nature of reality, of what we see and what we know.

"The verse and prose poems of this third collection by Harvey is rife with her signature wit ('the factory puffs its own set of clouds'), darkened by an ominous sense of fearfulness in a post-9/11 world, which the poems' seeming levity tries to combat. The backbone of the collection is a pair of sequences — titled 'The Future of Terror' and 'Terror of the Future' — that explore those two increasingly loaded words using a clever alphabetical system with surprisingly haunting results: 'We were just a gumdrop on the grid.' Prose poems bookending the sequences present a fable about a lonely robot ('When Robo-Boy feels babyish, he has the option of really reverting'); a study of appetite ('Ma gave Dinna' Pig his name so that no-one would forget where that pig was headed'); an explanation of how the impossibility of mind-reading led to love ('Even when they press their ears or mouths or noses together, the skull wall is still in the way'); and an unlikely dinner ritual ('rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside'). A few short, lineated poems punctuate the blocks of prose: 'World, I'm no one/ to complain about you.' Harvey continues to match her unique sensibility with subjects that matter; her poems are both empathic and delightful." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)