Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an “imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what was loved is now hated, what was benign becomes threatening, what was dangerous is embraced, what was worshipped is murdered, what was past is future. The author is cast adrift, to wander the earth from Tahiti to Prague, from Morocco to Miami, “in limbo” in a newly unknown world.

Part divorce journal, part travel poem, part meditation on the rudderless denizens of the global village of which the author is merely one, Limbo Road chronicles the search for the new beloved, the one who will lead to the new “City of God.” That she appears only in glimpses is a credit to Ken Norris’s adept reading of the late twentieth century, and his disciplined mapping of its increasingly unknown territories. A beautifully sustained work of lyricism from a highly accomplished poet.