The sestina is a traditional poetic form that has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity, thanks in part to McSweeneys.net, which publishes poetry exclusively written in the sestina format. The repetitive linking particularly suits the form to narrative uses and opens comedic possibilities for the authors, who have gone so far as to create even the table of contents as a sestina and have written a sequence of 39--a number that echoes the number of lines in their chosen form.

Casting themselves as poetic superheros, Jim & Dave take on Osama Bin Laden and various other villains, defeating the Masked Man in the end to the cheering of appreciative crowds at the "sestina bar." Cameo appearances by Jorie (as in Graham), Kenneth (as in Koch), Marvin Bell, Anne Sexton, Walt Whitman, Ted Berrigan, Phillip Levine, Gary Snyder, Arthur Rimbaud, Denise Duhamel, Robert Hass, Grace Paley, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other prominent poets make cameos. As Denise Duhamel explains in her introduction, "Though one may wonder 'who is the masked man that James Cummins and David Lehman defeat?' a more interesting question is, 'Who are the masked men writing these poems? And what has drawn them to the sestina as the perfect form for their creative antics?' As the two sestina meisters take turns writing individual poems (and collaborating on one together), the mild-mannered bespectacled lad and the dashing superhero that coexist inside both Cummins and Lehman rescue the form from the clutches of everyday life and transform it into something fantastic."

James Cummins is the author of The Whole Truth, a collection of sestinas about the television lawyer Perry Mason, Then and Now, and Portrait in a Spoon. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Cleveland and Indianapolis. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa and is curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection at the University of Cincinnati, where he also teaches.

David Lehman is on the core faculty of the graduate writing program at the New School. In 1988 he launched The Best American Poetry series. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Archie Rand has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions, and his work is displayed in major museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Bibliothique Nationale of Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He is currently the Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College and is the former chair of the Visual Art Department at Columbia University. Rand has previously collaborated on illustrated poetry projects with Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and John Yau.