Via surreal persona poems, prose poems, and false translations, Deeper the Tropics navigates the mythology of the self via the masked figure. Inhabiting perspectives as various as that of an ancient Assyrian king and J. Robert Oppenheimer, these poems present the self as an accumulation of faces over which we have only partial control. In this semi-public/semi-private space of self, Deeper the Tropics celebrates the imaginative leaps we make to find ourselves in ever-changing configurations: a group of African mask poems enumerates the speaker’s transforming understanding of ancestry, spirituality, and art; free-associative, false translations of chapters of the Tao Te Ching skirt singular notions of authenticity in favor of playful collaboration; and prose passages run through the collection, putting formal pressure on the generic constraints that constitute the (poetry) book form. Ultimately, the tropics, like the self, exist in a mythic space that is both local and global, fantasized of and politically contested. Similarly, these poems operate in a liminal space where possibilities propagate.