NEW TITLES
Foreskin's Lament
"The only place more non-kosher
than McDonald's was Red Lobster,
but I didn't need God to tell me
not to eat things with antennas.
Red Lobster seemed like the place
God made you eat as punishment for
eating non-kosher in the first place."

Song of Kahunsha
"Fear made me forget
that I have polio and
I am unable to run so
this man caught me easily and
slashed my face with a knife.
'I am Anand Bhai, and
your father owed me money,
so you must work for me.'"

Life Class
"Finally, there's the matter of
le baiser langoureux.
The artist Kit Neville may be fleshy,
soft, and ungainly, but
he has a muscular tongue that
he uses with the force of
an Oxbridge oarsman
heading up the Thames."

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It
"The English favor
collective or purely regional
sports team names,
while we have
the New York Yankees,
the Los Angeles Angels
which when you translate
the Spanish becomes
the the Angels Angels."

Cancel your Own Goddam Subscription
"A young man,
voice breaking with emotion
asked one simple question:
'Mr. Buckley .... have you
ever gone hungry?'
Buckley responded
'Why, yes, my yacht
experienced an
unfortunate shortage of
stuffed goose recently
between Nassau and the Bahamas.'"

Journey to the East
"He was an
economizer, a fixer.
The first thing
he fixed was his name.
He started out as
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret
but shortened it to Le Corbusier."

Great Reviews of the Past
21 Variations on a Theme
"We combed through
the early years of RALPH
to find what we considered
the best reviews (and stories
and poems) of our lives.
Here are twenty-one
that we loved beyond
all reason."

BRIEF REVIEWS
John D. MacArthur
Eccentric Billionaire
Bill Mauldin:
A Life Up Front
Jan de Hartog:
A View of the Ocean

LETTERS
The "Weeping Frenchman:"
The Ethics of News Photographers

MORE LETTERS
Pekin Ducks
Ezra Pound
Poems of Brooklyn

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Impressionism
The Barnes Foundation
World War One and Gas

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Onanism and
The Importance of Time

ARTICLES
In Praise of the One-Holer
"It was obvious
from the beginning that,
without running water
our more earthy needs would
have to be satisfied by
what the English have come to call
'the jakes.'"

READINGS
The Death of the Moth
"He once wanted to
show people how death operated,
and he did so by using
a Christian military commander
whose name has been preserved:
he was called Avram Brankovich,
and he fought in Walachia,
where, Satan claimed,
every man is born a poet,
lives like a thief,
and dies a vampire."

Gertrude Stein and Grammar
"Periods have a life of their own
a necessity of their own
a feeling of their own
a time of their own.
And that feeling that life
that necessity that time
can express itself in
an infinite variety that is
the reason I have always remained
true to periods."

POETRY
Great Poems from the Past
Song of Welcome
"Here are your pills on the plastic tray,
Your disappointing, crisp X-ray.
You are welcome to pray.
Here's your cemetery, a well kept glen.
Welcome to a voice that says, 'Amen.'
The end of the rope, old man.
Here's your will, and here's a few
takers. Here's an empty pew.
Here's life after you."

In Memory of the Horse David,
Who Ate One of My Poems

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"

SUBSCRIBE
Help perpetuate honest, noisy, pesky book reviews.
With your $25 subscription, you get
a free copy of one or more of the titles from
Mho & Mho Works