DANIEL GROVES has published poems in such venues as the Paris Review, Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Drunken Boat, and Smartish Pace. He lives in Rhode Island.

Sometimes I amuse myself by trying to characterize Daniel Groves’s poems. If Samuel Beckett wanted to write like Alexander Pope, but with the tiniest dash of Odgen Nash . . . If Byron had a child with Jorge Luis Borges, and that child had studied with both James Merrill and Groucho Marx . . . I give up. Daniel Groves is a poet like no one else. He’s one of the most inventive rhymers since Byron, but rhyme is merely one thing he does superlatively. What about those complex, self-interrogating sentences, rich with word play, puns, and puns inside puns—all to purposes as serious as art itself—and life? The Lost Boys is a book any reader of contemporary poetry will have to contend with from now on.