Per Petterson | The Insect Cookbook | Alan Turing | Antonio Tabucchi | Doctors Without Borders | Fatty Arbuckle | Eugène Atget & Walter Benjamin | African-American Images | Poems about Brooklyn | A Generous Letter from Warren Buffet

Time Ages in a Hurry
"'Nefelomanzia' he tells her, is
the art of predicting the future by
observing the clouds, or rather,
the form of the clouds,
because in this art,
form is substance."
Doctors Without Borders
"When MSF goes into a country suffused in civil conflict ---
Darfur, Sudan, and the Kivu region of the Congo ---
should it stay away from any controversy?
Or should the organization use this chance
to point to the world the roots of physical harm
devastating the citizens of that country?"
White Hunger
"All autumn people have come
just to have animal bones ground into flour.
Not a single grain, just bones, gnawed white.
Sometimes I think that soon, when his time comes,
I'll grind his bones too to make fine flour."
I Refuse
"My man's a garbage man
He drives a garbage truck
He smells like garbage all the time.
Someday in future life
I'll be his garbage wife
I'll smell like garbage all the t...i...m...e time."
The Chair
"I look through the files in my computer.
Blondes are disappearing from my poems:
the one who had tried to poison me with developer fluid;
the one I ran over with a motorcycle."
The Emperor, C'est Moi
"Autism. The word does not appear in the book, anywhere,
nor does any particular scene make the diagnosis evident.
It isn't that there isn't bad behavior everywhere, because there is.
It's just that the cause isn't specified.
It feels like a lot of disaffected adolescent fiction:
angry, accusatory."
Great Reviews of the Past
African-American Images
From the Dawn of Photography
"The pictures are haunting,
mystical --- moments in time
preserved in amber, in this case,
sepia, from 150 years ago."
Broken Land
Poems of Brooklyn
"The touchstone here is
not in having some great, some good, and
some so-so poems; rather, it is the ability
to show a uniformly high, rich collection,
where damn near all the poems are touching, funny,
alive in some magic way."

LETTERS
Another Letter from
Warren Buffet

MORE LETTERS
Edward Everett

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Twisted Spoon Press

ARTICLES
The Evening the World Ended
"He had the intense, goggle-eyed stare
made popular by Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann,
and like her he claimed to be a Messenger from God."

Great Articles from the Past
Fatty
"A scandal fueled entirely by
innuendo had been hideously successful.
Fatty's time was past."

READINGS
Fighting Father
"He didn't reach for his leg although
his ankle was bent at an unheard-of angle,
an angle never seen,
and he did not make a sound,
not a sigh, not a groan,
and I fell to my knees and
held his head and said:
'Does it hurt, Dad,' and then I said:
'Daddy, Daddy, does it hurt a lot,' I said."

Atget's Paris Streets
"They are not lonely, merely without mood;
the city in these pictures look cleared out,
like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.
It is in these achievements that Surrealist photography
sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between
man and his surroundings."

POETRY
To a Nose
"It was a like a badly-shaped sundial,
pensive and still,
it was an elephant turned upside down,
it was Ovid's nose, but ... nosier."

Strawberry-pie
"My childhood was too long.
I didn't grow up
before I become old. I begin to like ellipsis.
The missing penguin found refuge
in a bathtub
Morning rushed in like a rhino. Flowers and mistakes
were in the middle of the room. And now we have ham and eggs."

Great Poems of the Past
Death Is Sitting at
The Foot of My Bed
"Ms. Death announces she'll make up the bed.
I beg her not to bother: just leave it like that.
She insists and replies that our date's for tonight,
snuggles down and adds that she's in love and in the mood."