On her blog, wordstrumpet: Scenes From a Life Ruined by Poetry, Rachel Loden writes, “It’s tempting to feel like Rip Van Winkle: Did the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties even happen? It’s 1957 and Eisenhower’s on the golf course.” This question is a fitting query with which to approach Loden’s latest books of poems, Dick of the Dead. With three-quarters of Richard Nixon’s face on the cover and ideas of Loden’s other books, the reader can anticipate certain aspects of these poems; but wonderfully, the likely characters are never cast in the context or referred to in the tones we might foresee. A Richard Nixon Snowglobe, or the desire for one, for instance, is not something most of us are pondering. But for Loden, it’s as everyday as the Christmas Tree or Eiffel Tower we more typically imagine in that pristinely, white-flecked environment. In Loden’s poem, The Richard Nixon Snow Globe, an imagined character appears that “Might have physically needed to make one/ So he could see Dick’s head inside a dome/ While hoodoo snow is falling.” It is Loden’s persistent use of the political on a human and personal level that makes these poems thoroughly surprising, entirely absolute in their machinations and wholly pertinent to the times in which we live. As concerned as they are with politics and the economy, Loden’s poems are adeptly rooted, and exist in their own realm far from writing more typically considered to be “political poetry.” These poems are never abstract without necessity, never political without humor.