Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (January 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN: 1881471810
Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.5 x 0.4 inches
Price: $12.00

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The structure of the book is a variation of the triadic Dantean
set-up: inferno, purgatory, paradise. Cheap thing, to claim
Janine as Baratier’s Beatrice, yet the figural calling is there.
The book begins with “Letter # 3”—to Janine—whose last lines—
“The real thing, remember me, we can give each other something
worth leaving this time. The failed sense of a bridge when driven
under, interstates avoiding poverty to show the pastoral, the mountain
driven through with lights on, enforced sensuality when desire is only gravity.”
—especially the last bit about “enforced sensuality [surrounded by
absolute rock, driving through a mountain with the headlights on, through
a ‘tunnel of love,’ completely enclosed, claustrophobically so, as what ‘hell’
is?] where desire is only gravity”—nests neatly, definitively yet contradistinctively
with a letter, later, from Janine (not incidentally, the only response letter in the book)—
Stephen Ellis, from the introduction