Doppelgänged

Fritz Ward’s Doppelgänged is an electrified daguerreotype of authorial impulse, a swerving tour around the haunted amusement park we call narrative. Ward’s proxies write their own misadventures, setting up their shadowy sideshows near agricultural accidents, morgues, and drive-ins. The poems in this dazzling, maximalist collection swing gracefully through the reader’s reflection, and each risky inversion of verbal acrobatics allows both the speaker and the audience to share in the pleasurable vertigo that comes from working without a net. Doppelgänged’s fun house of mirrored forgeries reveals a portrait, in multiple exposures, of the poet himself and much more.