Yesterday's poets are today's detectives. They spend a life
sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into
the sunset. They entertain and sustain
me. Linden and Holder. Goren and Eames. Horatio Caine. I walk with them, adopt their ways, suffer
their failures, and consider their movements long after an episode ends,
whether in real time or rerun. (p. 32)
Clouds move past the sun.
A milky light pervades the skylight and spreads into my room. I have a vague sense of being summoned. Something is calling to me, so I stay very
still, like Detective Sarah Linden, in the opening credits of The Killing, on the edge of a marsh at
twilight. (p. 37)
The warm drone of a Law
& Order marathon was exactly what I needed. Detective Lennie Briscoe
had obviously fallen off the wagon and was gazing at the bottom of a glass of
cheap scotch. I got up and poured some
mescal in a small water glass and sat at the edge of the bed drinking along
with him, watching in stupefied silence, a rerun of a rerun... (pp. 163-164)
The book will be released in paperback this month:
