Each of these poems is some sort of story about stories. A crowded city undergoes a spell of enforced confinement. In a war of rumors and conspiracy theories, identities are stolen and shapeshifting outsiders infiltrate urban parks. New fiefdoms consolidate under the sign of pervasive unease. A landscape of dry rivers and toxic weeds reveals itself. Within the zone of isolation, all the stories play out again in the mind, through memory or dream or unexpected waking flash--spectral trespasses, plays staged in empty theaters, messages concealed in drowned books, lives that might have been lived but weren't, hermetic histories, lost paradises continuing to unreel in a subterranean screening room. The stories hang at last on a thread of melody, resolving themselves into a connecting filament that persists even at the core of silence.

"Geoffrey O'Brien's WENT LIKE IT CAME is riveting, delightful, an 'encrypted manual / for a universe invented behind your back.' While leading the reader through a labyrinth of tantalizing yet unstable mysteries and geographies, O'Brien 'delineates the musculature / even of what is not here.' At the center of this work where nested story meets Zen koan, he offers us what can't be seen, only sung."--Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

"Geoffrey O'Brien's poems are haunted. By whom or by what, you may ask. By the ghosts of the poems--the poems that come in dreams, the poems that could have been written otherwise, the poems that were never written but call out to be heard. These poems bring us an endlessly elaborated sparklingly detailed narrative suffused with nostalgia--a verbal cinema of exquisite harm and lurking fear, a 'dream in a story about a dream / being more elegant than any ever actually dreamt.' The pleasures of this work are not to be missed."--Norman Finkelstein

Poetry.