The Book of Treasures: Poems

In their collaborative poetry, Dustin Junkert and Shane Moritz drag the compositional practice of Exquisite Corpse kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The two poets finish each other’s sentences with often preposterous élan. Their subjects are projectiles of varying gravity launched at a Ouija board planchette. The scenarios they unfold describe a universe of pop-culture misunderstandings.

Somewhere at the intersection of David Berman, Anne Sexton, Robert Pinsky, and Stephen Malkmus lies the lyrebird glory of these poems, their impact amplified by David Nichols’s original drawings, whose air of tender perplexity provides a perfect emotional accompaniment.

“In The Book of Treasures, curators Dustin Junkert and Shane Moritz expertly constitute a kickass hyper-contemporary below-the-bug-line Cabinet of Wonders.—Michael Martone

“These paratactic poems deliver the shifting dimensions of life, but also the quick life of impulse They are acrobatically funny and urbane; they’re also slyly imbued with pathos. They revel, actively, in the music of the sentence, especially, and in the weird hum of the contemporary western world. —Laura Newbern