In Loew’s Triboro, John Allman’s fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queens, and its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood, himself among them. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of New York with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as _The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, _and The Asphalt Jungle. “The movie theater in this book,” says Allman, “is the place of darkness where lives are expanded and our culture defines itself through its most common denominators. The projections on the screen are scripts of fate, people caught up by love or violence, as real lives slip in among the film lives—and vice versa.”