"The Night Ballerina" is a fast-moving, cinematic word-montage that flows through seven uninterrupted sections to create what Dan Stryk calls an “artistically adventurous vision.” Its eclectic verse and occasional prose passages enact the rhythmic interplay of desire, anxiety, and elation in a journey of the psyche, melding together contemporary scenes with ancient parallels. Some of them are a crowded subway car racing under Manhattan, and a subterranean trance-journey in aboriginal Africa; a river baptism in the American South, and a Mithraic initiation rite in Roman Britain; a Freudian analysis of our perennial obsession with Sherlock Holmes, and a rain-soaked climb to a stone circle on a Yorkshire moor; a painter's conception of a fire-ringed, Shiva-like Jesus calming the sea, and, in the book's central metaphor, an ascetic ballerina framed in the window of a practice studio on a snowy night. Read Less