A rat climbs onto the desk of a bored office worker. A family dog never stops coming back to life. Every prisoner on earth is freed. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him. A baby is born transparent.

James Tate’s work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, “fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent” (New York Times), has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection, written before his death in 2015, Tate’s dark humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear are on full display in prose poems that are finely constructed, lyrical, and provocative.

With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and a true master.