The Promises of Glass is New Directions' third book by Michael Palmer, acclaimed as the most significant experimental American poet of his generation. The Promises of Glass, Michael Palmer's first new collection since At Passages (New Directions, 1995), contains seven sections: "The White Notebook, " "The Promises of Glass, " "Q, " "Four Kitaj Studies, " "Five Easy Poems, " "In an X, " and "Tower." These gorgeous new poems explore language and the "salt sea of autobiographies." His work also examines what Marjorie Perloff has described as "the absurdist 'displacement by degrees' one experiences in the post-urban world of late twentieth-century America.