You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt.

Welcome to Bookworm. Today, this is Michael Silverblatt. Welcome to Bookworm.

Today, this is my second week with the remarkable poet Kenward Elmsley.

People may ask why two weeks of Kenward Elmsley, and listeners to Bookworm will know that if there is a poet whose work includes board games, jigsaw puzzles, anagrams, palindromes,

well, this poet would be beloved of the bookworm, and that is what Kenward Ellesley's work is like.

There is no knowing what he can't pull out of the alphabet

and what he can't turn into song.

And so two years ago, when an incredibly beautiful book called 26 Bars came out,

it's a book of Tales by Kenward Elmsley and Pictures by Donna Dennis,

26 bars was published by Z Press, and it is astonishing.

Almost a marriage of the alphabet with its incredible foldings and unfoldings and songs,

there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

This book is full of the bars that would make up songs,

and so we have 26 bars, all of them American drinking places,

all over a hypothetical America, each of them rowdy or high class or low class or sci-fi or computer-oriented.

There's no end to the vision that unfolds in this book.

It seems all to have been put together by Japanese entrepreneurs

who've diddoed and mimicked and built copies of all the bars elsewhere.

...