The Twin
"Helmer van Wonderen
is a Dutch farmer.
He lives with his
dying father,
twenty-three sheep,
twenty cows, and
two donkeys."

Nobody Move
"I'd tell you the plot but
a plot in a detective story
never means squat.
Try to parse
Kiss Me Deadly or
The Maltese Falcon."

The Forsaken
"Down with
that vulture Trotsky,
from whose mouth
a bloody venom drips,
putrefying the great
ideals of Marxism!"

Stumbling Toward Enlightenment
"We should not
forget that her school,
the Zen school of Buddhism,
is hard-line, even puritanical.
One might think of it
as the Calvinism of
oriental religions."

The Elephant Keeper
"What joy they must
have felt as they crossed
meadows white with lady's smock,
as they trailed
through fields of long,
silvery grass skimmed
by swallows."

The Unlikely Disciple
"There are Christians
who vow 'to have
as many children as
biologically possible.'
The movement takes its name
from a Bible verse that
praises a man whose quiver is full."

Water
"World literature
would be much improved
if characters in novels and
stories had drunk water.
Then they could have
done away with depression,
adultery, incest, violence,
and pestilence."

Calvin Littlejohn
"One of the last photographs
taken by Littlejohn,
from 1991, shows
George W. Bush,
looking vacuously happy
with a local minister."

Great Reviews of the Past
At the Ends of the Earth
"The sailors pointed out,
accurately, that there was
little to see there, unless
you were interested in ice,
snow, lichen, icebergs,
fog, and frostbite."

LETTERS
Dada
Sarbola

MORE LETTERS
Dung Beetles

EVEN MORE LETTERS
Cryptic Letters of the Month
Godwill
Life from Many Sides
Ice Cream Cart

YET EVEN MORE LETTERS
Letters We Never Finished Reading
A Faithful Morning

ARTICLE
The Beauty (and Wonder) of Motorcycles
"I'd put sugar in his gas tank
to slow him down and puncture
his tires as often as possible.
Those babies are dangerous and
he is too old to have
any reaction time
at all."

READINGS
Water, Inc.
"Today Mother died.
Or maybe it was
yesterday, I am not sure.
Which made me think that
instead of coffee or brandy
I should probably have water.
I tasted it and it didn't
taste bad."

The Ulitskaya-
Khodorkovsky Correspondence
"When I appeared
before the Komsomol
faculty committee, because
I needed a character reference,
it was with a
feeling of revulsion and
a travel permit in my pocket."

POETRY
Death and Children in Stone
"children forever
singing wreathed with singing
blossoms children of
stone with blossoming
eyes"

The Green Silence
To Hump A Cow
"the way to hump a cow is not
to get yourself a stool
but draw a line around the spot
and call it beautifool"

Delta Flight 659
"I still see the poet in you, Sean Penn.
You probably think fans like me are your penance
for your popularity, your star bulging into a pentagon
filled with witchy wanna-bes and penniless
poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula
of glamour like so many menacing penguins."

THE OFFICIAL RALPH
Paradox-of-the-Month

GENERAL INDEX
All the back-issues of RALPH,
including titles of books under review,
along with author, subject, and publisher,
plus links to readings, articles, and poems
that have appeared on-line
since 1994.

A PITHY SAMPLE
of our most notorious reviews
as collected in the hard-copy
"FOLIO"

SUBSCRIBE
Help perpetuate honest, noisy, pesky book reviews.
With your $25 subscription, you get
a free copy of one or more of the titles from
Mho & Mho Works