It’s difficult to decide how seriously to take the cover illustration of Peter Conners’s 2011 publication, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, which realistically portrays crows on a hangman’s noose. The title of the collection of poetry is taken from a short piece in the collection, “Meat Zoo,” in which various edible and fantastic carcasses are on display. The cover of the book and its title both point to the darker elements, but these often exist side by side with bursts of whimsical hilarity. For instance, a poem composed as a series of single lines includes a moment in which a “little girl lifted her tramp dress for the man who put his finger inside and wiggled,” but concludes with the charming vignette, “The parade goes swimmingly. And then there is pudding” (from “Entrance: Where We Leave From”). The challenge is to decide whether to let the whimsy redeem the darkness a bit, or to focus on the macabre contrast presented by such a dynamic union.

It’s tempting to take a musical hint from the title of the poem “The Directions That We Move (slight refrain),” and from Peter Conners’s 2009 memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, which chronicles his fascination with music while following the Grateful Dead. An NPR review that includes the memoir muses, “the power of music is similar to the power of books — but books are notoriously poor at describing the abstraction and subtlety of a melody. Still, authors keep trying to bottle the magic.” Perhaps this is what Conners has done in The Crows by including a light refrain of levity in a composition of darker strains.

Certainly, Conners’s writing style is melodic. Often, an entire piece is composed of rushing sentences that merge together without the mechanics of punctuation. Although the book is labeled poetry, there is much of a flash fiction element which tempers the delivery of Conners’s images. “The Owners of Things” is composed of three distinct “flashes” that moves from a hand-me-down wristwatch to

Porcupine quills bedecked with beadwork. The boy batted the earrings around the kitchen floor like a dog worrying a clean, white deer skull. Or a porcupine. The boy batted the earrings around the kitchen floor like a coyote worrying a porcupine.

Perhaps the mercurial nature of The Crows is why the cover illustration sounds a false note. The poems do not rely on conventional pairings such as crows and a noose; they derive their energy from an uncanny reordering of the world. There is nothing expected about Conners’s work— a crow would be more likely perching in a playground or a wedding.

Conners himself is as unpredictable. The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees is the latest publication in the wake of a non-fiction work, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, and he is now at work on The Death of Electric, a project that he calls “a music-based novel.”