This evening I went to a poetry reading downtown...partly to support the guys who run the series, partly to get out of the house and away from reading Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross for my African Lit. class, and partly because I've been interested in Noah Eli Gordon for a while.

But it ended up that Joshua Marie Wilkinson made the greatest impression on me, so much so that I purchased his book Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, which is based on an imagined correspondence between the painter Egon Schiele and the philosopher/linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I also picked up Gordon's The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, for good measure. Boy, he reads like an uzi submachine gun set on automatic, so quick he kept running out of saliva, his face plum purple and gasping.

The last fella to read, Jake Adam York, began by saying, "This is dedicated to someone who couldn't make it, whoever that may be."