Albert Goldbarth was born in Chicago and educated at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the University of Iowa. He taught for a decade at the University of Texas at Austin and now teaches at Wichita State University in Kansas. His poems are rich with the history of the language and manage to extract both dark and witty meaning from that very history. The erudition on display is both dazzling and compulsive, and the unsteady line between the two impulses provides part of the pleasure of his work.