Stephen Berg’s Elegy on Hats is a shocking book, in the end beautiful, lyrical, thoroughly human. Berg is a religious poet, as Baudelaire is, with a divine gift of self-damnation. Few poets are as “self-listening.” Using the metaphor, among others, of his mother’s imagined collection of hats, in pain and ecstasy, he sings, revealing secret truths. Hypocrite lecteur, to read this book is to risk a change of heart. —Stanley Moss