The Winter Dance Party lays out, not someones entire life, but that persons life as a poet. This enthralling, career-spanning book by the National Book Award finalist David Kirby is made up mainly of new poems along with a generous number of older ones alternating with one another in nine sections that proceed, not chronologically, but more like chapters in a surreal memoir, with long poems followed by short poems, exploratory formats next to more traditional ones, straightforward poems cheek by jowl with ones that are more allusive.