NEW TITLES
Pruning Trees
"My lovely artemisa,
All dressed in lavender gloss
With the deciduous perfume
That enfolds your frail arms.
Infinite hydrangeas of infinite sorrow.
Wistful wisteria, my sorrowful artemisa;
And you, my sweet,
barely escaped from the sunscald:
My lovely artemisa freed."

Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake
"This is a master
who is witty, curious,
sometimes insulting,
sometimes base,
many times cutting,
never at a loss for words.
His theme is:
'Shut up the mind;
you know nothing...
so stop pretending.'"

African Intimacies
"We will make sure
that Namibia will get rid of
lesbianism and homosexuality.
Police are ordered to
arrest you and deport you
and imprison you.
Those who are
practicing homosexuality
in Namibia
are destroying
the nation.
It is the devil at work."

The Somme
"Behind us lay
the Abomination of Desolation,
a land of scorched and cratered
meadows of shattered riven hedgerows,
and homes abandoned and made desolate.
The smoke and reek of War hung over it;
the fair face of the earth
was warped and cankered in
a long-drawn agony."

Best American Magazine Writing 2006
"The editors who
pumped up this fat compilation
of sixteen journalistic works are
part of a dying beau monde.
The once vibrant matrices
of American letters, such as
The Atlantic and
Vanity Fair and
Esquire and
The Virginia
Quarterly Review ---
are now drying up
in the bonefields."

Great Reviews of the Past
Learning to Fall
"Good people will
go poor and starve;
good people will also get rich
and be generous with those
who don't have.
Bad people will get super rich
and continue to rob the have-nots.
Bad people will also
get cancer or TB or AIDs
and suffer and die horribly."

BRIEF REVIEWS
Suicide
True Meditation
The Best Buddhist Writing 2006

LETTERS
Northwest Art
Charles Krafft

MORE LETTERS
Edward Curtis
Benedicte Wrensted
American Indians

EVEN MORE LETTERS
The Rooster in
The Wristwatch

ARTICLE
Great Articles of the Past
Hugh Gallagher
"Gallagher died nearly three years ago.
Few registered the importance of his passing.
If anyone was responsible for
curb cuts, ramps, and general accessibility
for the disabled in America,
it was Hugh.
These came about, he said,
because 'I got tired of peeing
in a coffee can at my job
in the Senate Office Building.'"

READINGS
His Picture Nowhere
"It was the hush
that still got us,
just standing there,
hearing every movement,
every creak of bone,
every swallow,
breathing in pulses of silence
while we gazed vacantly at
what was once someone's everything,
my tape recorder recording the nothing.
Until Alcedia took the silence."

Great Readings of the Past
What the Cults Believe
He knew how to weep,
and how to make others weep.
His pathetic stories ---
of drunkard's children, wives,
sisters, aunts, grandmothers, etc.,
of atheist soldiers dying on the battlefield,
of heroic missionaries garroted in the slums ---
were famous in their day,
and kept the country damp."

POETRY
Night Father, Night Mother
"We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.
We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whispers."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

A PITHY SAMPLE
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"

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