Comic writers laugh at the folly of humanity (“Poor, sufferin’ Hugh Mannity,” as Flann O’Brien put it).

In Max Frisch’s strange and beautiful little novel Man in the Holocene, an old man named Geiser is trapped in his home in an Alpine valley in southern Switzerland by the collapse of a supporting wall that blocks the highway to the tiny village.

No one jokes with me when I go to Tehran.

One of my biggest fears is that I will die because I have talked too much.

Red blood cell. For twenty-five years, every time I’ve heard or read the term, I’ve thought of Arby Sea.

Slowed a little by a stone in my shoe, I arrived in Galway City a while after dark. Galway City, the Sodom of the West!

The Grants moved into a brownstone on East Sixty-sixth Street—financed by the general's supporters—in 1881.

The house at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street was the third from the end in the Grants’ lives together.

Toying with a gun as a train goes past / June is what I’d imagined, dark / intermittent woods set off / by the whiteness of a collar, a book / I can’t believe we’re left alone with.

On the morning of his ex-wife’s appointment, Kenneth Rivers still owed her an RSVP.

Poems routinely solicit—they may even include outright—generalizations about everything from barbecue methods to categorical imperatives, but they raise special puzzles, or paradoxes, when they solicit generalizations about themselves, since good poems try to be as unlike one another as possible.

This is the book of three diseases.

Now the fever root, / the marsh weed, the marigold.

Incandescent, black body / your soul is on the floor.

Do you think everything you’re supposed to think?

My living brother / is treating us to dinner.

The beautiful invisible music falling from the speakers in the other room / is Mahler imitating the snow

You’re a wet thing in my throat: oyster.

Praise the Mohawk roof / of the donkey’s good & grey head

The ice encases the branches / of trees as if beauty can just.

The earliest writing in Golden City / left turn-signal sensors / trafficking / in Variegated Solomon’s Seal

(April 3) / Not often is it that I grace / my own eyes

Tape unspools from a cassette, / collects—a nest—between two / pieces of driftwood

I don’t know a thing about paradise || In my house nobody ever brought it up

the way orchestra sounds in birmingham / that’s my sound.

I was lost before I returned.

Having fixed the typewriter, / eaten the oranges and eggs / the house’s owner left, I sat / at the white table and tried to tend / to the need for deepening sacrifice / without upsetting my urge / for everything to be responsible / and pure.

Imagine a happier Miss Havisham.

The Collector—wearing an oilcloth hat, overcoat, and soaking-wet boots, slogged through rain, a fish-shaped basket of gray willow sealed by a flap of leather across his shoulders.

The 1970s were Charles Newman’s decade.

A decade ago, I was Charles Newman’s student in St. Louis. A celebrated novelist came through that fall to read a list of current faculty when she stopped at a name. “Newman? Charles Newman?” she said. “God, he’s an icon.” By the time I came into his life, he drank too much and ate too little.

All that we know definitely about Purcell’s history as a choirboy is that his voice broke in 1673... beyond that lies the territory of invention.

It had all taken longer than it needed to, of course.