The infernal topographies of the title are more psychological than geographical, though physical travel and the infusing of the past into the present are also at issue. Driven in part by the anxieties of time and mortality that have always been at the root of lyric, these poems are also shaped by the pressure of the likely collapse of the current social order, and by impending and current extinctions. Weaving the domestic, the oneiric and the outside worlds, these are poems that try to find a place from which to speak and think when so much seems to be ending.