Fire Island, Bette Davis, reincarnation, the movies, Henry James, the Russian baths, being lonely in public, following strangers, washing a corpse, the FDR Drive and the racetrack all figure predominantly in Michael Klein's The Talking Day - a talking book of poems that speak to the terrible beauty of the world we live in and the world we live without. "I'm dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted" is the first line of the first poem in this book and by the end, that haunting has turned fear into grace.