A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker) nRobyn Schiffs fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Arts information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museums encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art. n nNovelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses--parasitic wasps--in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.n