Border Towns

The several essays that comprise Border Towns chase, 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, greengrocers, 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. Border 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.")