Ghosts
"I guess if you are
going to be floating naked ghosts
up and down and around your story,
you have to ground it somehow.
After all, these
wandering spooks
do provide us with
a merry contrast to
the other characters."

Homer & Langley
"He was going to
create a single newspaper
for all time,
the eternally current
dateless paper.
With this, you and I
would never have to buy
the Times ever again."

Deaf American Poetry
"Hail Gallaudet! Thy sons and daughters throng
Into thy halls with laughter and song;
In grateful homage, true, they praises bring,
And to thee, Gallaudet, in gestures sing."

Busted
Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
"Mixed in with this tale of
national economic disaster,
governmental malfeasance,
the appalling misuse of
consumer gullibility and innocence,
is an extended account of
the author's personal experience."

Letter to D
"The reader is left to wonder
what poor Dorine saw in him.
But it was enough, obviously,
to sustain them both, and ---
ultimately --- to kill them both."

The Double Life of a Rebel
"Some of us
are daft enough to suggest
that if a poem doesn't
make it in translation
then there may be some question
about its importance."

Bonk
"She will be fitted
with a vaginal
photoplethysmograph probe
to study her level of
arousal while watching
selected pornography.
All in the name
of science."

The Suicide Index
"The reader is thinking
it is poison, isn't it?
Suicide paralyses
everyone involved
in a way that is
very Old Testament."

Soul Survivor
"I prayed for a wife
with green eyes ---
and one who was Asian ---
and my second wife, Andrea,
has green eyes and
her mother is one half Filipina."

Great Reviews of the Past
Airborne
"There are over 100 shots
in Airborne, and they
not only redefine bodies,
they do the same
to the art of dance,
and the art
of photography."

LETTERS
Nabokov, Waco and
American Eagles

MORE LETTERS
Jerome K. Jerome
Three Men in a Boat

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Bird Girl

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
Being Touched
Diplomatic Immunity Payments

ARTICLE
Botox Shots and Pacemakers
"Last year when I
was away from here
and the icy winter,
my heart went
into atrium (or atrial)
fibrillation while I was
resting in the blessedly
warm sun there on
a blessedly
warm beach."

READINGS
Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
(And Existentialism)
"You never know
when someone is
going to drop in
the one word that
gives everyone the
deep serious look,
existentialism."

Caring for the Very Old
"Oh you like to make a joke,
jes' like your father.
Your mother, she
don' make too many jokes,
not now anyway."

POETRY
The Evening Light
"Broad and yellow is the evening light,
The coolness of April is dear.
You, of course, are several years late,
Even so, I'm happy you're here."

Cats and Poetry
"She's dead now almost nine years,
and before that there was one
during which she faked attention
and I faked obedience.
Isn't that what it's about ---
pretending there's an alert cat
who leaves nothing to chance."

Great Poems of the Past
Les Cloches
"The baker's wife the baker
And Cousin Gertrude all
Will smile at me when I walk by
I won't know where to lay me
You'll be far from my side I'll cry
And that will kill me maybe."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

A PITHY SAMPLE
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"

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