Border Towns [Paperback]

The several essays that compriseBorder Townschase, worry, and trouble ideas about situation and reference. As a group, the essays??? topics???color, lycanthropy, African-Canadian history, cooking, public transit, etc.,???make an unlikely field. But through all its pages the book traces and describes acts of situation; and???for all its werewolves, green-grocers, and paeans to miscegenation and migration???its interest is not in capturing but in ???the shape of reference itself.???

The title figure of the border town serves as a ???beard??? for the unassimilable. The author, whose other Dalkey books are poetry books, writes, ???The mistake or the short-sightedness is to perceive border towns as finite or one-to-one compositions, or as places where monoliths stretch and mingle; or stare at one another???..Perhaps at best is border town???the term???the gesture toward something that???s actually untenable or untenably awkward.??? SoBorder Towns???the book of essays???is perhaps, finally, a book about poetry. (???It often seems to me,??? writes the author, ???that one of the best uses to which prose can be put is describing poetry.???)