<B>The new poetry collection by Stephen Burt, “one of the most gifted poets of his generation” (Frank Bidart)<BR></B><BR><P>Our skills are finally in demand.<BR>If you mock us, Pan,<BR>In whom we also believe, do it<BR>As gently as you can.<BR> —from “The People on the Bus”<BR><BR>In <I>Belmont</I>, Stephen Burt maps out the joys and the limits of the life he has chosen, the life that chose him, examining and reimagining parenthood, marriage, adulthood, and suburbia alongside a brace of wild or pretty alternatives: the impossible life of a girl raised by cats, the disappointed lives of would-be rock stars, and the real life to which he returns, with his family, in the town that gives the book its name, driving home in an ode-worthy silver Subaru. Can a life be invented the way a poem can? What does it mean for a precocious child, or a responsible grown-up, to depict the world we want? With wit, beauty, tenderness, and virtuosity, these poems define the precarious end of extended adolescence, and then ask what stands beyond.