Response by Juliana Spahr. (Sun & Moon, 1996)

This book really takes me back to the 1990s. UFO abductions, Oprah, multiple personality disorder. The book is really an intelligent essay on how the self is constituted. "thrashing seems crazy." I could see reading it along side of Oliver Sacks and Frederick Crews. Questions of witness, testimony: we want to believe the testimony of survivors, but what if what they claim to have survived is alien abduction? There is compassion: these people have been through something, if not alien abduction. For what, then, is alien abduction a metaphor?

North of Boston by Robert Frost (1914).

"After Apple Picking" was not as good as I remembered it to be. This is an amazing book, however. Frost is already Frost. The wife in "Home Burial" is estranged from her husband because she doesn't understand a metaphor. Burying their child, he talks about a cedar fence rotting after two days of rain. The wife wonders how you can talk about a fence at a time like that. Yet the husband cannot explain his own metaphor either.