Ichetucknee
"If you want to visit
the river of the beavers ...
hurry. The bulldozers are,
as we speak,
there at its portals."

In Search of Small Gods
"Anyone who can write about
reading the Georgics and,
in the same moment, on television,
see two women making
love in a field of wildflowers
can be forgiven anything."

Early Stone Houses of Kentucky
"The most troubling
are photographs of those
that have fallen into disrepair,
available to what the author
refers to as builders of
vinyl-clad housing
to disassemble in order to
spawn their disgusting modern-day
plastic structures."

The Humbling
"'Would you like
to come inside?' he asked.
'Why? Do you want to try to
seduce me too?
Do you make a specialty
of retooling lesbians?'"

My Little War
"Since she was too
poor to buy false teeth,
she 'simply walked around
with the eyes of a thirty-year-old
and the mouth of an
eighty-year-old.'"

Great Reviews of the Past
Sarbola
"At one point
it refers to microbiologists at
The Pasture Institute in Paris,
perhaps a place where
over-age French researchers
are put out to Pasture."

The Ice Palace That Melted Away
"He wondered why
we stuff people away
in prisons set out in
the desert or on some
bare hunk of nowhere land.
Let the prisoners see
what they are missing."

LETTERS
The Book
Still Here

MORE LETTERS
La Malinche
A Ringtail Cat
X. J. Kennedy Elegy

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Pet Supplies
Miss Josephine

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
THE IMMUNITY AGENT

ARTICLE
Vice Versa
"So, now I am the owner
of a blindingly white 2008 Versa.
Its colour is very helpful,
because it is so small
that if it were darker I
would have difficulty
finding it in my carport."

READINGS
The Making of Fitzcarraldo
"Being wide awake at night
now seems natural;
I hardly sleep.
I do not know
what real sleep is anymore;
I just have brief, strenuous
fainting spells."

POETRY
Ninety-Six-Year-Old Estonian
"After a decade of this
I strangled the Chinaman and
stole his money and consequently
had a happier life working
on freighters between
New York City and ports
in Central and South America
as a deckhand."

Late
"I'm not jealous of
their real passion trapped
as they are within a television set
just as my doctors are trapped
within their exhausting days and
big incomes that have
to be spent."

Great Poems from the Past
Korean Love Poems
"My American pants are hanging over the chair
in the corner with your Korean dress.
Over there they can decide foreign policy.
But here we are like two spoons
you and I
in the same warm bowl."

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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