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Informationen zum Autor C. S. Giscombe is the author of several books of poetry, including Giscome Road and Here, both of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press. He has also published a memoir entitled Into and Out of Dislocation. He is the editor of Mixed Blood, a poetry journal, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Klappentext Contains essays, criticism, and other prose writings. Zusammenfassung 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, green-grocers, 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. The author, whose other Dalkey books are poetry books, writes, “The mistake or the short-sightedness is to perceive border towns as finite or one-to-one compositions, or as places where monoliths stretch and mingle; or stare at one another…..Perhaps at best is border town—the term—the gesture toward something that’s actually untenable or untenably awkward.” So 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.”)
