The Jack of Diamonds Is a Hard Card to Play

You know it's not the usual Texas of most books when you enter the saloon in the first poem and witness a deadly game of poker with a brown river as one of the chips in the pot. Here's a shopping mall turned suddenly into a biblical desert; birds that play jazz; a bull named Plato remembering the golden days in Periclean Greece. Or the two cousins that trained a pig to dance and re-enact the Italian Renaissance in a burlesque skit.