In Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah, Michael Trussler engages with the beauty and violence manifested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The poems here blur online reality with Zen Buddhism (relating the Japanese female anthropomorph Hatsune Miku to Basho), and explore humanity's changing relationship with Nature to gain a deeper understanding of language and technology. With thematic subtext pertaining to mental illness and aging, much of Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah offers the sense that this subjective experience parallels the way our species has sabotaged itself. If these poems contain much grief, they also rejoice in the simplicity of light, the colours painters show, and the intricacy of what remains of the natural world.