Consult virtually any childhood development guide and you'll run across the term "parallel play": when children under two are placed together, they'll play separately but won't actually interact. Stephen Burt's second collection of poems, Paralllel Play, describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness. In precisely crafted poems rife with humor and insight, Burt examines life among his coterie of characters and venues-from the rock clubs of New York City to the basketball courts of the WNBA, from the canvases of Kline and Richter to the canvassers in a hard-fought election, from two lovers trying to make a go of it to the two albino squirrels who "make a sort of couple, like Hepburn and Grant." Parallel Play confirms Stephen Burt as one of America's most exciting new voices.