Now Make an Altar

Out of this book's gathering of speakers (arsonist, leper, Captain Haddock, the maître d' of an unusual restaurant) and subjects (dung beetle, Aristophanes, medieval surgeon, methamphetamines) emerges a baroque, musical, and formally inventive history of creation and destruction. Now Make an Altar dispassionately suggests that there can't be one without the other. And there is nothing, however broken, absurd, atrocious, or sublime that cannot be brought into ecstatic focus in this "mysterious feast" of dense and exacting language. "Come in, come sup," Beeder invites us in the book's opening poem. "You'll never feel full."