Nicholas Moore and Ivan Blatný were 20th-century poets whose stars burned bright in their youths, Moore in England and Blatný in Czechoslovakia. Then both men were battered by history and individual fate.

The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping is a formally innovative book that explores their life stories. Its wildly imaginative structures are built on meticulous research, and as the two men’s separate, parallel existences unfold, they reveal astounding coincidences and heartbreaking reversals of fortune.