{"product_id":"9781564787651","title":"Border Towns","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe several essays that comprise \u003ci\u003eBorder Towns\u003c\/i\u003e 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, green-grocers, and paeans to miscegenation and migration—its interest is not in capturing but in “the shape of reference itself.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title figure of the border town serves as a “beard” for the unassimilable. The author, whose other Dalkey books are poetry books, writes, “The mistake or the short-sightedness is to perceive border towns as finite or one-to-one compositions, or as places where monoliths stretch and mingle; or stare at one another…..Perhaps at best is border town—the term—the gesture toward something that’s actually untenable or untenably awkward.” So \u003ci\u003eBorder Towns\u003c\/i\u003e—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.”)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dalkey Archive Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47051334713584,"sku":"9781564787651","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781564787651_p0.jpg?v=1763770760","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781564787651","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}