Daisy Dunn’s answer in Catullus’s Bedspread, her new “biography” of the 1st-century BC Roman poet, is to marry a breathy, vivid narrative voice with know­ledgeable digressions about the peculiarities ...

The style fell out of fashion only to be revived first in Alexandria in the third Century BC and again by the Roman poets starting in the 50s BC. Catullus and his peers developed the form ...