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"Once a week, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" offers us an essay by Codrescu, poet, professor, and social critic. His second collection of these essays is as delightful and sometimes disturbing as the first, A Craving for Swan ( LJ 1/87). From the most trivial (Vanna White is a "a Dada artist" who methodically destroys language) to the most significant--the condition of our souls, say, or our imaginations--little escapes Codrescu's penetrating vision in his 100 meditations (he uses his glasses as prophylactics, he says, to keep his "eyes from making reality pregnant"). The result is a book that uses whimsy and a penetrating intelligence to make our lives more vivid."
- Charles Bishop, Univ. of New Orleans