Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of Backwards Days are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell’s poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of Backwards Days are most particularly about the movement of time, physical movement, and the movement of the heart. Through landscapes both real and of the psyche, they live on the edge of an elusive understanding never quite gotten right.