If you said 'cubism' fifteen times, you would be getting close to some of what Percival Everett, a famous novelist and gifted painter himself, is playing with in this new book of poems. In words that mimic process, the poems here attempt to reverse the canvas, taking perspective and skewing it to reflect the world around it, spiraling into the work as a way to get out of it. Often what stands in the way of art is art itself, a lingering delusion that there is such a thing as beauty, especially universal beauty.