If all girls had mouths
like yours I'd be done for.

from the poem Elegy Scale by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

How could that pair of lines not bring a sly smile to your face?

That's what happens after I read that poem -- hell, any poem -- from Calvocoressi's collection Apocalyptic Swing. I'm either smiling at a clever phrase, reveling in her choice of words, or utterly seduced by the story the lines of verse have whispered into my ear.

This is the best, most stirring collection of poems on boxing, jazz, religion, small towns, and big cities that I've read in a long time.

Check it:

Epistle From Her Daughter
           Yet to Be Consummated Back East

Love, you'll stick your finger into
anything. Sweet cream, valve oil, the mouth

of every damn baby that gargles.
You're insatiable, and that

city will screw you within an inch
of your life. Leave before the sun goes

down, before the cars start cruising
from Sunset to the canyons

and someone writes a song that goes
something like The city is burning

as the city startles and burns.
I've got no chance in the face of all

that starlight. Those boys on the beach?
All muscle and grass and nothing

but time. Come back. Pack your cheap bag
and get your ass on that bus.

Oh yeah. More, please.

Simon Rich's Free-Range Chickens is a collection of funny short takes on life and the bizarre situations many of us find ourselves in. Only rich makes them a little more bizarre. Many of these takes could be skits on Saturday Night Live, where Rich is a writer. Like current SNL skits, though, some are hilarious while others are more "ha" or not so funny.

Here's one of the really good ones from the section If adults were subjected to the same indignities as children:

GARAGE

ALBERT ROSENBLATT: Can I drive your car? I'll give it back when I'm done.
MRS. HERSON: I'm sorry....do I know you?
ALBERT ROSENBLATT: No, but we're the same age and we go to the same garage.
MRS. HERSON: No offense, sir, but I really don't feel comfortable lending you my car. I mean, it's by far my most important possession.
PARKING ATTENDANT: Mrs. Herson! I'm surprised at you. What did we learn about sharing?
MRS. HERSON: You're right...I'm sorry. Take my Mercedes.

The section on God is really good, too. Not for the easily offended, though.

My friend Maud recommended this book to me. Rupert Thomson is one of her favorite authors and she sold me when, in her email to me about the book, she wrote that his books are "incredibly propulsive" and that The Book of Revelation, in particular, is "pretty fucked-up!"

Sold.

From the novel:

And so it came, the day of his mutilation.
     He was lying on the floor, as usual, when the door opened and the women filed in, one by one. All three of them were wearing red hoods over their heads. All three of them were naked. They looked like the cardinals of some arcane or sacrilegious church. The hairs lifted on his arms. There had been a change in the women. He could feel it. It was as if, in stripping themselves of their clothes, they had removed all decency, all inhibition. As if, naked, they might be capable of truly monstrous things.

I couldn't put The Book of Revelation down. Just a warning, though: it's not for the squeamish.

Chilean Roberto Bolaño is fast becoming one of my favorite authors.

"Why?", you ask.

Perhaps it's because when I read his work it feels as if I'm moving through hundreds of years of Latin American literature.

From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become part of the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.

I can't wait to read more of Bolaño's work.

Patti Smith, from the book Just Kids, after having visited the Museum of Art in Philadelphia for the first time at the age of 12:

I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Just Kids is the story of Patti Smith, one of the greatest performers in music, and Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most significant and controversial photographers of our time.

This book, however, chronicles their lives before the fame and recognition. Patti and Robert are two fledgling kids living in New York City and full of a longing to live a creative life full of unconditional love and support.

   I was particularly moved by the drawing he had done on Memorial Day. I had never seen anything like it. What also struck me was the date: Joan of Arc's feast day. The same day I had promised to make something of myself before her statue.
   I told him this, and he responded that the drawing was symbolic of his own commitment to art, made on the same day. He gave it to me with out hesitation and I understood in this small space of time we had mutually surrended our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

Philip Roth's American Pastoral is a fascinatingly dense story of appearances and the realities that are hidden behind them.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

Then Roth delivers the kicker:

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

It took me longer than usual to read American Pastoral. It's layer after layer of dense detail that unravels with each page. The attention was worth it, though. The reward is having read one of the finest, most eloquent works of fiction ever.

Epileptic is a graphic novel by comic book artist and writer David B.

The story is autobiographical and focuses on the life of David's family as they struggle to deal with the effects of his big brother's epilepsy. It's a marvelous and insightful book.

The thing that really got me was how David B. used his gift as an illustrator to depict the trials he, his parents, and especially his brother, were going through.

For instance, throughout the novel his brother's epilepsy is depicted as a dragon-like creature that haunts the family. The dragon constantly suffocates David's brother as it envelops his mind and body, especially during a seizure.

It's intense imagery.

From Wallace Shawn's dazzling and disturbing dystopian play Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009):

You see, the reality is -- and those of you who are younger may find this terribly hard to believe, but it happens to be true -- the reality is that in the old, old days when I was growing up, people simply didn't think very much about their genitals. And they never talked about them. So you see, for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing -- I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines and newspapers -- I can't get over it. Ha ha ha!

Further reading on Wallace Shawn's Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

Twyla Tharp

This is the first book of 52 books I will read this year. One book a week.

I thought this passage about how Twyla Tharp began The Fugue captures my endeavor well.

There's a difference between a work's beginning and starting to work.

I learned this with one of my earliest dances, The Fugue. Being a novice choreographer I didn't know where to begin. So I stood up in the center of the room, took a deep breath, stamped my foot, and shouted "Begin!"

To this day that's how The Fugue starts out -- with a stomp that rings in my mind "Begin!"

If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.