“When the world rights itself, bears will turn into bulls,” the title poem of Metaphysical Bailout promises. After the 2008 Wall Street crash, we struggled to understand what had happened economically. Bankers, politicians, and newscasters contorted language in new ways to express—and ultimately obscure and perpetuate—an old story of American life: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The eighteen poems in this chapbook highlight the bizarre and at times humorous ways in which language is perverted to support power, even while showing how language and story insist on telling on a greater truth. As “Modern Maturity” asks, “What if one day the men you trusted/ walked out, and suddenly,/ you woke up?”