Bøker av John Emil Vincent

Chatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire chronicles her later career and luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say.

Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide's wreckage. After John Emil Vincent's best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance without wisdom.

Excitement Tax uses a series of tonally various prose sonnets to trace the deeply uneasy relationship of a grown-up person and his imaginary friend, Walter Weaselbird. The pair crash through thickets of erudition in search of candy. Often they find candy.

Approaches John Ashbery's critically neglected poetry with an ear to his use of the supremely elastic pronoun ""you"" and an eye toward his construction of his books as books. This book argues the poet has been paying increasingly keen and affectionate attention to his readers.