Surreal Expulsion's title poem responds not only bluntly to the 2018 mass shooting that left seventeen dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School but ultimately to the socio-political negligence and indifference behind violence and injustice worldwide. In assorted other blasts D. R. James confronts contemporary issues and personal skirmishes against "sapient insufficiency" through free verse and hijacked forms (prose poem, cento, sonnet, villanelle), arresting images and twisted wit, exposé and surreality. In toto, the collection wrestles, now soberly, now sardonically, with strains of "barbarity, barrels of it" as well as of "the calm shadowy fraud."