Cody Walker's Shuffle and Breakdown, his first collection and a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2005 and 2006, is a work of comic brilliance and devastating irony. From "Abbott and Costello: The Alzheimer's Years" to a series of letters to Whitman from his imagined grandson, this is a wondrous strange book that operates with the precise timing of a great joke, while bracing itself for dissolution and worse.