Maggot is Paul Muldoon in his dense, slippery, formally obsessive mode.

A collection of poems that wriggle through history, violence, language, animals, jokes, elegy, and grotesque little verbal traps. It is clever in the old murderous sense of the word — not merely smart, but equipped with teeth. The collection moves by echo, mutation and recurrence, with poems feeding off one another like small organisms in a sealed jar. Muldoon is not a poet of clean revelation; he is a poet of misdirection, pressure, rhyme, rot, wit, and aftershock. Good for readers who like poetry with a brain, a knife, and no interest in behaving nicely.

First US hardback edition, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very good used condition with light shelf wear and minor handling to jacket; clean internally.