prose pieces that played off each other in the manner of jazz improvisations. "I was interested in the tangentially related, each piece a discrete paragraph, sometimes an act of definition or redefinition, sometimes a description, occasionally a story." Throughout, Dunn takes a personal ownership of words that the dictionary merely defines objectively. The wisdom and startling verbal turns we've come to expect from his poetry are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that compose this volume. There may be debts to Ponge and Calvino here, but Stephen Dunn has made prose pairs a fascinating genre of his own.

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