Border Towns

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.”)