Representing the best of ten books and 20 years' work, this is a magical mystery tour into Sweeney's strange, unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, and taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are coming to the work for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and disquiet at the way the poems shift from a fireside chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the hallucinatory, from the suprisingly real to the really surprising.