Sometimes the notes are ferocious, Skirmishes against the author Raging along the borders of every page In tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, They seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!"...Learn More

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all...Learn More

Smokey the Bear heads into the autumn woods with a red can of gasoline and a box of wooden matches. His ranger's hat is cocked at a disturbing angle. His brown fur gleams under the high sun as his paws, the size of catcher's mitts, crackle into the distance. He is sick of dispensing warnings to the careless, the half-wit camper, the dumbbell...Learn More

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom, balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale, but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier than training him to sit obediently on one spot with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie. With pencil and paper I subtract my weight from our total to find out...Learn More

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all...Learn More