nathan dueck thinks really hard about pop culture. In his new collection, A Very Special Episode, he pays serious attention to the pieces of our past that have been lost in the internet era, whether it is magnetic tapes or the Smurfs, rabbit-ear antennas or She-Ra. A child of the ’80s dueck plays with the past and with our ideas of a poetry canon. In these playfully challenging recreations we find Mr. T in The Waste Land and a selection of sonnets – one for every letter of the alphabet – on topics from the Care Bears to Zoobilee Zoo. This is a smart, entertaining and ultimately questioning collection, one that asks us to consider how our ideas are shaped by the cultures surrounding us.