"Metamorphoses springs from Ovid's epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life (gay desire, bicycling), Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval. Like a fever dream over Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Kennedy has one foot in Ancient...