Alternator by Chris Banks is a masterful poetry collection that blends catastrophe and consciousness, modern living and past transgressions, off-kilter imagery and the “hidden room” of the unsayable to construct a polyphonic triumph. In the title poem, Banks says, after decades, all he wants to do is “thread fire through the eye of [his] imagination, ” and the product of his labour are these new poems born of whole cloth: surrealist meditations, modern ghazals and powerful narrative sonnets that are both alive and burning.