Drawing on Arthurian myth, the Romantic poets, the ill-fated “Great War” efforts of the Newfoundland Regiment, modern parenthood, 16-bit video games, and Major League Baseball, these poems examine the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both as individuals and as communities, in order to explain how and why we are the way we are. At its heart, Romantic interrogates our western society’s idealized, self-deluding personal and cultural perspectives. From Romantic: Like the Green Knight, stooping to retrieve his own severed melon from the stone floor of a banquet hall where it rolls past startled courtiers to then catch against a table leg and stop, I’m fumbling for an errant thought; without his flair for theatre, the practiced ease with which he grips a hank of hair and hoists his head aloft …