Vanity corrupts the empires on the grand tour from ancient Rome to revolutionary Iran, from Europe in the Age of Reason to America in the Age of Television. William Logan's poems find Ovid in a London gentlemen's club, Romeo and Juliet in Florida, and the varnished splendors of religion and politics surviving at the seedy edge of culture. VAIN EMPIRES is breathtakingly intense in language and disturbing in its moral intelligence.

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning...