A World in the Evening offers visual and literal poetry—poetry that cannot be reconciled with the brutality of history, with the death of a poet and the sleep of reason. Inescapable nightmares of the past are reflected in the present. Of Goya’s print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Aldous Huxley wrote, “When reason sleeps, the absurd and loathsome creatures of superstition wake and are active, goading their victim to an ignoble frenzy. … The Caprichos were published in the last year of the eighteenth century; in 1808 Goya and all Spain were given the opportunity of discovering the consequences of such daydreaming. Murat marched his troops into Madrid; the Disasters of War were about to begin.” Martha Gellhorn, writing on the Spanish Civil War, shares this: “Then for a moment it [the bombing] stops. An old woman with a shawl on her shoulders, holding a terrified, thin little boy by the hand, runs into the square. You know what she is thinking. She’s thinking she must get the child home.” Cities at night, the rebuilding of a fire-devastated fourteenth-century cathedral, a lonely eighteenth-century New Mexico mission, and the poetry and theatre of Federico García Lorca are among the inhabitants of A World in the Evening.