Border Towns

The several essays that comprise Border Towns chase, worry, and trouble ideas about situation and reference. As a group, the essays topicscolor, 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 migrationits 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 Townsthe book of essaysis 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.)