Twelve Great Hits
Each month,
our server serves forth
a list of the reviews, readings,
poems and articles
that are most popular
with our readers.
Here are the winners.

NEW REVIEWS
Edward Lear: Egyptian Sketches
"They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon,
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon."

Points of View
"Nabokov reported that
the one photograph that
caused him the most anxiety
was a picture taken
a month before he
was born."

My Name Is Not Sidney Poitier
"When Not Sidney Poitier
goes to visit the professor,
Everett says,
'Anybody ever tell you that
you look like Harry Belafonte?'"

La Cuenca de Los Angeles
"One might call it
bilingual hip-hop:
Me tinca or
bien scraggly or
one false move and
eres tostada."

Rhyming Life & Death
"He runs the show,
makes it possible for
there to be
a character named Author,
part of himself
written into the mist of
this 'fiction.'"

Making Poems
"Those who want to be poets
could do no better than
to get this and
study it faithfully.
You get the opportunity
to read a poem,
then watch the author
deconstruct it."

Audition
"It becomes engrossing,
then all-enveloping,
and at the end,
a non-stop earth-moving machine,
grinding to its ghastly conclusion,
taking us along
with it."

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense
"One million dollars
stacked up in $100 bills
is a couple of feet high.
A billion is more than
three times as high as the
Washington Monument."

Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems
"'Don't you love him?'
we asked a friend from Cambridge.
'Well,' she said,
'You remember how the verse goes:
Taffy was a Welshman
Taffy was a thief.'"

Meteorites
"Alan Hale saw the comet
one night and sent an email to the
Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams,
which is, apparently, not
a place for galactic messages
but where you call
if you want to report a comet."

Florida's Great Ocean Railway
"Before 1900, only madmen and
rednecks ventured into Florida,
if for no other reason
than it was suicide,
with mosquitoes as vector
for all kinds of murderous diseases."

Great Reviews of the Past
Human Rights in African Prisons
"If you plan to
go on a rampage,
don't do it in
Belarus, Bermuda, or Russia.
Next to the U.S.,
they have the highest
confinement rate
in the world."

LETTERS
Wisawa Szymborska
A Graduation Speech

MORE LETTERS
My Bloody Life
Reymundo Sanchez

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Chrome Hairpin Tables
Hopping to Hear

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
FORGIVE MY INDIGNATION

ARTICLE
The Mitsubishi Galant
"The automobile that
bears the family name
combines the slanty
aerodynamic design typical
of Japanese cars with
a unique fuel
injection system based
on chopped liver
with onions."

READINGS
Busto- and Lip-Inflated, Blow-Arriba Dolls
"I caught a glimpse
of myself bajo las despiadadas
luces fluorescentes del mall
and harshly judged myself
as wanting."

A Lifetime of Lard Sandwiches
"At the graveyard,
he says to Clarence,
'I'm ninety-four years old.
I can't see too good,
I can't hear too good,
and I can't walk too good.
You keep your shovel sharp!'"

POETRY
From the Tower
"Insanity is not a want of reason.
It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.
Explaining why, in two-ton manifest!, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:
spare us all your meaningful designs."

Two by Christine Hamm
Signs You Are Ovulating
"Colors seem brighter.
You start to confuse your elbows
with your chin, your knees.
You find yourself robbing bodegas
during your lunch break."

What We Think About the Missing Girl
"And sometimes when we dream about a sweet pale liquid
and wake up in the dark, our lips cracked,
our eyes wet, we are dreaming about her hair."

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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