Description

Book Synopsis

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, greengrocers, 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. 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.”)



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Border Towns

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    A Paperback / softback by C. S. Giscombe

    £11.99

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      Book details

      Publisher Dalkey Archive Press
      Published 6 October 2016
      ISBN-13 9781564787651
      978-1564787651
      ISBN-10 1564787656

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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, greengrocers, 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. 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.”)



      Trade Review

      "A major figure in contemporary African American letters." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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