The River and the Black Cat

Sixty-four improvisations, whose principle motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers or the three musketeers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, among others, ghost in and out of poems ordered according to the progress of the seasons. Their moods and perspectives range from the inconsequential and paradoxical to the melancholic and erotic. Almost all the poems...