Cult poet and musician Mike Doughty makes his print debut with Slanky, a black-comic stroll through the demimonde of pop culture and modern urban life.

Doughty’s poems are at once absurdest and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he re imagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.