Nightwood Editions, 81 pp, $15, softcover.

Reading Anthropy made me think Ray Hsu really wanted to write a novel: one of those tight compact books that leaves you gasping for air, such is his talent for illusory dialogue, for setting a historical scene. His conversational exploration of the everyday life of philosopher Walter Benjamin could, as he cites in a section at the end called "Deleted Scenes", go on and on.

This filmic sense of things proceeds through most of the book, even through a look at pop icon James Dean in a poem called "The Art of Being Photographed":

The film is an extended funeral.

I fell for the race

He hurtled in. Left, against the door. Forward.

This juxtaposition of historical figures as characters, however, often leaves the reader out: it's hard to know where you are here because Hsu refuses to craft entrances into the text. At best, the reader is positioned as voyeur to the violent images. Maybe he really wanted to write a film script.

Still, the requisite poetic elements are there; the heart, for example: "The engine is a heart,/A handful of nails" and "The heart is a bucket/for all things." But any sensual moments are so cold that it's hard to connect to the dialogue in any visceral way. Again, the reader is held at a distance with only a passive role to play.

When Hsu hits a more playful note, his work loosens up enough to be more engaging. One of the most successful poems is a short, tight one called "Lag":

I know you. The brown squelch

where your boot mistakes the water.

Behind the rest of us you lag

when you used to be fastest, intent

and fastest. By the time we grew to six,

seven, adolescent quorum, unpacking

our tastes like dirty crates, you

were long and lost, out of our league.

The image is continually made through the repetition, and the conventional syntax is appropriate for capturing the nostalgia, the remembrance of times past.