In The Milk of Inquiry, poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum has written his most beautiful book - more mediative and more provocative than his previous, much-praised work.

The volume's most ambitious gesture is a long poem, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," a sequence of 115 bawdy, speedy sonnets, spoken by mythological figures ghosting as historical personages - among them, Orpheus speaking as Elvis, Proserpina speaking as Freud, Adonis speaking as Cleopatra, and Daphne speaking as Wilde. The swirling disobedient voices form a closet drama, a splintered monologue, a shadow theater of violation and transfiguration.

The book begins with short lyrics that show Koestenbaum's opulent sensibility at its most austere. Meanwhile, in a long autobiographical poem, "Four Lemon Drops," he jostles the reader with pleasurable, roller-coaster swerves, and hurtles - in quatrains - between the poles of irony and lament.