Ars Poetica

In the caveat to this irreverent and hilarious satire, Clay Reynolds writes, “No poet writing today could be this lucky, this tragic, this infamous. Indeed, it wouldn’t be tolerated.” No, one will have to admit, it wouldn’t. Offered in the same vein as Jane Smiley’s Moo and Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Reynolds’s Ars Poetica explores the life of a modern-day Don Juan, a hedonistically ambitious poetaster of our own times, a self-styled Lothario, but, as the tragicomedy ultimately reveals, a man