Poetry. SECRET, BUT KEPT IT ROOM explores the development and stasis over time of self as image--at once real and artificial, subjective and perspectival, engaged in the physical world and torn from it, a self often disappearing into non-self. Mike Gubser treats the art of poetry as, in some sense, the art of experiment and problem-solving by placing the notion of self in various contexts--romance, depression, friendship, travel, memory, isolation--and poetic forms--visual, musical, lyrical modernist, numeric--to see how it reacts. Mike Gubser has published various chapbooks and a book on turn-of-the-century Austria entitled Time's Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in fin-de-siecle Austria. Presently, he is a history professor at James Madison University in Virginia. Before then, he worked as a high school teacher, a writer for an international development organization, an instructor at San Quentin Penitentiary and an English teacher in Czechoslovakia