The most celebrated work of Dante is the Divine comedy--a vision of hell, purgatory and heaven that provides a strangely surrealistic view of medieval attitudes on religious dogma and the price of disobedience.

The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay--dearly, with both money and conscience--to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: "$20 for five minutes. I'll hold your hand in my own," one ghost says. "I'll tell you you were good to me." Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She...