Belovèd beast

Beloved Beast is an American travelogue of sorts, says Dennis Finnell. In part it records a cross-country trek by car and by air from the Catskills to L. A. and halfway back, with encounters along the way with Washington Irving's headless horseman and Rip Van Winkle, Humphrey Bogart's Nick in Knock on Any Door, an ersatz Huck Finn working the tourists in Hannibal, and others. "One might say that these poems are about being an ego," Finnell explains, "an I, America's most highly mythologized product, and how being this American self increasingly means being isolated, a party of one. I suppose the beloved beast is me, is us, our country, our selves, and the poems here trace out the figures of the beast - lyrical, social, cultural."