Book excerpt: Poetry. "LOVELIEST GROTESQUE is a darkly fascinating book. It's a sweet, shape-shifting creature and a fun postmodern romp. Page after page fills with energetic surprises, keeping the reader intrigued--formal quatrains juxtaposed against prose vignettes... short-line riffs against skinny sonnets against a ballad that spreads across the page against a pantoum with the word "orient" in it. Finally, the slippery slope of too much fun might stop for a nano moment to contemplate an important existential question: "Why were there manatees at all?" Obviously, the answer is this: after 9/11, in the new millennium, all formal discourses must explode, splinter and fragment and coalesce again into a stunning, new voice."--Marilyn Chin