Mark Laba’s Inflatable Life is a collection of 35 poems pondering everything from Edgar Allan Poe to skeet shooting to TV variety shows he watched as a child, most now forgotten in the vault of broadcast history. Consequently, The Inflatable Life, features singing, dancing, drama, comedy, and commentary on gritty pulp fiction, “Borscht Belt” humour, ventriloquism, and comic books, so that the poems collectively present a kind of Jewish vaudeville both surreal and lyrical.

Almost daily, we experience strange juxtapositions of the traditional and the modern, the old and the new. After a yoga class, students flock to their cellphones in order to catch up to the rest of us. Ceremonial tea and aspartame-filled energy potions are served side-by-side in bustling franchised coffeehouses. And yet we usually tread these strange pairings absent-mindedly. In John Reibetanz’s eighth book of poetry, Afloat, one witnesses these types of unexpected collisions manifold, and comes away with a multi-faceted understanding of the book’s main muse: water.