After storming the scene with Stereo(TYPE), the PEN America Award–winning poet makes his highly anticipated return—with a virtuosic sophomore collection that plunges the listener into the tenebrous realm between dreams and reality, and firmly establishes him as an essential voice in American poetry

“I’m coming to you live,” Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, “from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out O’ Luck St. / with my monkey paws.” So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the listener through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan of the poet’s youth.

In the long central sequence, “Territory,” Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one’s nemesis (or one’s self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life—“the real and various guns pulled on me”—trickle into the narrator’s sleep, as he flees from vision to vision, “picking the fruit in one dream and eating it in the next.” And though the poet begins to wake in the book’s third and final section, he’s still running from the “body snatchers / in uniform.” Mixon-Webster’s musings turn to love, and the often destructive desires it provokes in us, as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage your future.

These are seeking, supple poems, whose forms adapt to contain their transfigured images. What emerges in this daring second collection is a surreal and haunting portrait of life in modern America, where pitfalls hide in every promise.