Catalogue

Contents of The Book of Whether or Not:

ash; poem comparing the virtues of salt and
saffron; battle formations, with counsel
against them; sight particles which pollinate
the eye; an invective against glass-blowers
and their secrets; two recipes for life

Contents of The Stone Book:

thoughts passed along mycobiotic tunnels;
the follies and passions of lightning; child
rulers, with musical notation of their most
important proclamations; reasoned defense
of soil and its medicinal applications;
celebration of the Nocturnal School of Poets,
and response to their critics

Contents of The Book of Now and Then:

theories toward the construction of a water
that flows upward; traveler’s accounts of the subterranean cities; messages contained in
the blinking of certain stars; human gills;
bread from flour extended with bark

Contents of The Book of Ligaments:

laughter; heat and sympathy defended;
melancholy; fountains, a clear night in
Spring; the distillation of dreams; the
glass-blowers’ grievances; an inexpensive
alternative to salt; remedies for agues,
clammy limbs, hay fever, and befuddlement

How The Book of Never may be known:

by the orange pill in smoke, more moon than
sun, by its stitched-up-in-leather, by its
recipe for your enemies, may they be
replicated and consumed, by the hair you’ve
just coughed up, by malice, by the porcelain
bust of a horse, by its unknown longings, by
the goosebumps on its binding, by the
inhuman vowels it sings

Contents of The Book of What Is to Be Done:

sermons; marginalia from a cousin, lettered
in wax and ichor; a doorway; a fine pillow,
torn; a ceramic pot brimming with
raspberries; the drunkenness that joy
brings; the world on its crown

Futures recollected by The Book of Signatures:

I will have bound a world from aether into a
slow syrup. I will have found the world
Achilles held before him to be no protection.
Attention is an unlikely vastness. I am fading
from one cold dream to another. Children
gleaming down iceways, a single muffled
breath passed around like a loaf of bread. A
loaf of bread, and the dogs allowed within. I
will have pressed on it. I will have seen it
brighten. It comes down in flakes.

Contents of The Book of Lime:

the heart’s metabolism; it is difficult to
imagine the body’s outside. Do rocks? I need
to know: the dust skin makes, in eddies
through the door, adequate bread and
perfect lettuce; haunt and not dead; the
belly’s butter; the tooth’s lettuce; the star’s
grasp

Things which may be done with The Book of Humor, Explained:

rest one’s head upon it; teach it the Lord’s
Prayer; house it in birdcages; distribute it
like fishes; prove it in a warm place; harvest
its syllables; fail to burn it, for that is
something it has seen to; drop it in
pondscum, that it may return to your
doorstep, filthy with judgment; sign it

Contents of The Book of Umbrage:

alleyways; trouble and its siblings; in those
days, all I wanted was for you to shine on
me; sorrow is a slim boat; coins that land on
both sides at once; the world’s goodbye

Contents of The Book of Seasons, Perpetually:

a rat king, with vision of his reentry into
Heaven, reflections on the sublime music
which greeted him there, and homily on the
throne which he will sit upon until the day of
judgment

Contents of The Raw Book:

design for a gown two may wear
comfortably, so as not to dress alone

Contents of The Book that Snows:

love, business, revenge, and light sport;
moral defense of the author before his
critics; marginalia to a secret love

What The Cloven Book of Salvation does:

heats; cools; tempers; swirls; thinks in
reaction; makes of one a book; goes about
the earth; reasons the begetting of reasons
that ravel a peacock led by crocodiles over
the strings of human life; dreams quickly

Where The Tangle Book may be found:

at the bottom of a dry well; in Galicia; in the
place things go when they are least
necessary; in the crypt of Pseudo-Dionysius;
under a plot of rosemary; where the sun
neglects to shine; dropped by raptors onto
rocks far below; in seasons; under the
weather; on time; with pleasure

Things which The Book of Shadows knows but will not disclose:

the hysteria of books

What The Book of Below is for:

for picking locks; for larches that tell lies
sweeter than honey; for nights in which
fireflies have found their way, improbably,
into your workroom

That book which you can almost remember:

the world comes together at the last
moment; you have been stitched with shards
of sand, silica becoming syrup; lay your head
against the gloryhole; dream pastorals to
your city, to your passing through, to your
city