My Soviet Union is the title of Michael Dumanis’s Juniper Prize-winning book ($14.95 Univ. of Massachusetts), and indeed he was born there, coming to the United States when his parents were granted political asylum. But the geography of his poems is vaster than that now dismantled nation -– they zip along the mind’s twisting roads, revealing a landscape both recognizable and strange, compelling and unsettling: “This country is so thin and worn that we / can see each other through it.” Bone-dry wry but with an emotional earnestness that can be believed, the poems can have an almost jaunty melancholy -– “For me, the sweet smell of periphery” -– and are often briskly musical -– “I catch myself clutching / a wrench at a Wal-Mart.” This is work able to mock, embrace, and mourn our ever-dismantling world -– “how is it you navigate toward every ending, // your lips in a grin, your arms opened wide, / holding neither a wand nor a fire extinguisher.”