Pfenning perusing his award-winning poem—an ingenious bricolage of images, phrases, and mordant cadences purloined from a miscellany of poetic forebears from Poe to Frost, Eliot, Roethke, Lowell, Plath, so finely enmeshed no unsuspecting reader could identify them; nor does he want the homely girl lingering in his office, where, in forty-seven minutes, Genevieve Chambers is expected to knock the “secret knock” at his door, which will be discreetly closed at that time.
