Ralph La Rosa, as the title indicates, has created a delightful collection of poetry pastiches and whimsical words-of-play, including playful sonnets, weird lists, clerihews, proverbs and converbs, tailgating couplets, strange rhymes, and auto-epitaphs of famous poets. Enjoy La Rosa's celebration and unique spin of the classics, as he pays homage to Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Frost, Plath, Keats, Pound, Williams and more. I have eaten the bacon that was in the fridge ... Readers will enjoy the poet's resurrection of famous poems as he uses them as springboards to tackle today's pop culture and politics. And to wrap it up, he ends with a brief story about Chinese and American writers, including Allen Ginsberg and Annie Dillard, whom La Rosa leads through Disneyland.

In this deeply felt book, nine American writers and thinkers from different points of the religious compass discuss how their work is nourished by spiritual concerns. Diana Ackerman explains why she calls herself a messenger of wonder and how, in her observations of the natural world, there is a form of beholding that is a kind of prayer. David Bradley recalls how his inheritance as the son, grandson and great-grandson of black preachers has enabled him, at considerable pain, to be touched by the word. Frederick Buechner makes an intensely personal journey to his roots as a novelist: In fiction, as in faith, something outside ourselves is breathed into us if we're open enough to inhale it. Allen Ginsberg describes how his poetry is grounded in the Buddhist idea of renunciation of hand-me-down conceptions and the meditative practice of letting go of thoughts. Mary Gordon retraces an odyssey in which the religious beliefs and forms of a Catholic girlhood turned out to be as useful as a wiretap to the grown-up novelist. Patricia Hampl describes how the writing of Virgin Time took her on a series of pilgrimages to explore the contemplative life. Hillel Levine tells of his search for the mystery of goodness, exemplified by a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who saved thousands of Jews on the eve of World War II. Hugh Nissenson explains how his work as a Jewish writer has been animated by a sense of the holy and shaped by the poetry, drama and narrative of the King James Bible. Jaroslav Pelikan revisits three religious writers--Augustine, Newman, and Boethius--whose influence on other religious writers over the centuries has never gone out of fashion. Together, as William Zinsser notes in his introduction, these writers are on a pilgrimage to find the source of their faith as individuals and their strength as artists.

Garland's magnificent facsimile series of the manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the Bodleian Library, Oxford ( The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts , 22 volumes, 1986-1997) is now made complete by the publication of its Index-volume. Volume XXIII provides the key to the contents of the Shelleyan notebooks and papers in all their complexity: poems, prose, translations, fragments, calculations, drawing and doodles, addresses and other miscellaneous jottings. The accumulated findings provide a treasure-trove of information about the Shelley's lives: their writings and readings, and echoes of classical and later authors; the people they met, corresponded with, rented houses from, or saw perform; the towns they visited, the very houses in which they lived, the lakes and rivers they sailed and the mountains they climbed. The intellectual and physical data of these manuscripts will help open new vistas for students of their lives, thought and creative writing.