David Lau teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Cabrillo College. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Wildlife, and other magazines.

"For those willing to experience poetry without requiring a rational explanation, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is filled with shock, curiosity, and delight." Believer "Lau's syntactical constructions and deconstructions surprise and deliver meaning in parts equally fresh and astringent... Colorfully dense, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is a rewarding book that demands rigorous attention as Lau constructs and deconstructs his subjects." Verse

• Acknowledgments I Prosopopeia Day to Start on the Floorboards, Rain to the South, Any View a Machine New Organic Shifts Suburbatross Immortality Going Out Man with Archiving Machine Iovis Omnia Plena Happiness Is for the Terrestre Many Jasons Absolute, The Tell Pearl The Tupperware Concerto Black Line Drawing II Oil Trees Awkwardnesses They Camped for This Day in the Villages Overlooking the Plain of the River Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Film The Spy's Council of Breezes Civil War Yucca Flats Stag Metacinematic Skirt Border of a Traumatophile Parade Boom Kiss Boom Boom Kiss Restlessness on the Hummock To an Ectopic Shepherd Apotheosis of Groundlessness III Tears Open the Sky behind Every Gesture Now Now There There You Know Her Skirt Settles on a Cow Vertigo Fastener Exclusion Act Scene Heroes of Our America Domesticity Effect July Montaigne Toward Disunion's Opal Land Bridge Extra Strength Resistant Resistance Songs about the Avant-Garde Protest in Philippines Where I Shall Need No Glass Moved Only by Mechanical Device The Birth of Reality Out of Appearance Seiche Yesterday Lectures Virgil and the Mountain Cat Jellyfish Notes