In addition to their heightened language, the poems that inhabit IN THIS ROOM possess a metaphorical sensibility to the particularities of this world that navigates between images both dark and light: "Cancer / and the covered CorningWare dishes cooling on pot holders" waiting to be served up after a prayer meeting held in a church basement, the good feeling of "break[ing] a rack of pool balls, / stand[ing] with your legs apart, stroking the cue between fingers and thumb, aiming at the tight / diamond . . ." contrasted with "the breaking sounds around the room / like the splintering of bones, the firing of Berettas / and Glocks, the jukebox wailing like mothers and fathers, " a Voyager spacecraft "coursing / through interstellar space, eleven billion miles / from Earth . . . traveling through the dark [with its] gold-plated record"--these are some of the images that populate Terry Lucas's first full-length collection.