Everyone but me seems to have passed the week distracted by news accounts of the outlandish dysfunction of the British royal family. Meanwhile, I was trapped without a light in the secret architecture of a sentence. Know what I needed? One of those maps on the wall that says “You are here.” Now I consider any story told me by anyone – including friends, relatives, colleagues – to be woven out of the delusions of an unreliable narrator. Even established facts have acquired blurred edges, an odd kind of ambiguity. Just as a for-instance, the writer Alexandre Dumas had a son who was also a writer named Alexandre Dumas.



Howie Good’s most recent poetry collection is Gunmetal Sky, available fromThirty West Publishing.