In De Veyra’s fifth collection, grief smokes a cigarette in a dim jazz club before chopping a moundful of stars into little white lines. A son playing the piano is actually praying for his dead mother’s resurrection. Streetlamps debate the existence of God, bicycles become tools for society’s destruction, and the moon sulks in the corner like a washed-up comedian. Malevolent spirits of the dead gather behind the shelves of a 7-Eleven.

Where language drifts between dream logic and philosophical inquiry are the strange cartographies of absence, mortality, and memory. The poems are riddles that seem to be more confused by their own questions, simply content to wink in the shadows. Here is humor that is sly and almost conspiratorial, with a smile that understands tragedy is just a well-rehearsed joke with better lighting. It is séance disguised as punchline, a bebop-punk rock- elegy in the key of X major, a reminder that loss never really ends—just remixed into a weirder song. And, after paying last respects to the dead, it knows better than to head straight home.