Two strangers meet by the Hudson River, but is it they who have that sort of love poet’s write about- or is it their lost siblings, each miscarried, who exist in a twilight universe? In this novel, the poet Katerina relates her memoir to her mentor, an acclaimed poet named Virgil. When Virgil passes, Katerina finds love with Dante, but unbeknownst to them they have something in common: both have an imaginary sibling that they tell their deepest secrets to. Katerina’s memoir relates the stories of Iacopo, her imaginary brother, in tandem with memories of her own childhood and life: including when she first met Dante. The narrative is an intensely personal account of her life at the college before and after the death of her mentor Virgil, a place that comes alive through magic realism. But conflict of the work is embedded in her mental landscape as she is reunited with Dante, when she finds and loses love, or as she puts it, reaches out to discover the most beauteous oblivion. Tied into her experiences are the stories of her imagined sibling, who is stuck in a parallel universe where he is continuously riding the trains: Iacopo’s life is structured by the unknown system of trains, the focus is not on the railroad itself, but rather the world as is arranged in a series of sharp scenes through his uncompromising eye: murders, love affairs, lost children. Iacopo’s world is clearer and more fragmented somehow than ours, given his pathological contextlessness. Like an ode to the unknowable, this is a novel about the lives lived in a world much like ours. But Iacopo, the passenger, is an eternal stranger, never knowing where he might end up, and yet easily and relentlessly entangled in the affairs that transpire in each place he lives, where he quickly discovers the secrets of the inhabitants, but more slowly reveals his own fractured past, in accord with Katerina’s memories of her life. Hers is a percipient memoir of a life of mystical imaginings, and family strife, wherein it becomes difficult to know what is real or imagined.

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