Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

*Winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry* I have this rearrangement to make: symbolic death, my backward glance. The way the past is a kind of future leaning against the sporty hood. —from "Bugcatching at Twilight" In Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys - D. A. Powell's fifth book of poetry - the rollicking line he has made his signature becomes the taut, more discursive means to describing beauty, singing a dirge, directing an ironic smile, or questioning who in any