The most obvious and compelling strength of True Stories is that, like much of Atwood's verse, it seems to grow naturally and with ease from a personal vision no less articulate for its privacy. Reading Atwood has always been like following a guide's brilliant flashlight through an eerie but not entirely unfamiliar cellar. In True Stories the guide has emerged to the light of day only to find the world no less frightening a place. Gestures of love and family and day-to-day life jive in a danse macabre with the incomprehensible and chaotic lunges of poverty, torture, and imprisonment. Familiar and foreign become indistinct, and Atwood's remarkable sensibility finds itself the choreographer of two strange partners….

In many ways, True Stories is a collection of anti-travel poems, dismissing our assumptions of both home and away as facile and ridiculous. "The palm trees on the reverse / are a delusion...