David Bachner‘s Capital Ironies is a collection of twenty-three poems and short prose pieces, each a walk through some different aspect of Washington, DC-the city’s monuments and public spaces, its boulevards and side streets, its trails and riverside promenades, its famous and less-known sites. Beyond being a tour of Washington’s physical landscape, however, these writings are explorations of the deeper life of the city, a life, Bachner writes, whose “blatancies, nuances, and contradictions” he has come to know well after forty years of residency.