I do like a comedy that punches neither down nor up, and, I’ll admit, keeps just inside the realm of snobbery, and this one has real Donald Antrim vibes.

One of the most important books that Coffee House Press has published, I think, about a mother and translator of obscure Mexican poetry. A book that wanders with care and is designed to be read on public transportation.

“What if the only face of desire I recognize is loss?”

“No, it’s never occurred to me to describe a knowledge-producing event as anything other than a trauma.”

“How can one speak of the present when one feels abandoned by it?”

“How do you come back from that for which there are no words?”

I met one of my best friends, Justin, trying to find Carmen Boullosa's Texas, The Great Theft at a Powell's in Cedar Hills. Justin was working the information desk, and overheard me asking after the great Mexican author, whose work I was collecting to completion. The Book of Anna inspired my interest, at least in part, and even inspired a full reading of Anna Karenina (during a year, 2020, in which everyone and their mother would be reading War and Peace). Boullosa is a fascinating chameleon.

Originally published in 1996 and 1997, Paul Metcalf’s three volume Collected Works was one of the first books I bought from Coffee House. I knew nothing about Metcalf at the time, other than that he was the great-grandson of Herman Melville, and that he had written Genoa (which you can get as its own volume from Coffee House Press) which was partly about Melville, but also about Columbus and about an executed murderer.

My favorite is probably Volume 2 (1976-1986), but all three of these volumes are terrific, with Metcalf making surprising and startling connections by bringing different ideas, historical periods and figures, and preexisting texts into collision with one another in a way that defies genre.

This book summons, for me, the ferocious brilliance of Thomas Bernhard, and something all Haber's own.

I loved these pocket-sized books that CHP published in the 1990s in a series called “Coffee to Go: Short-Short Stories for People on the Run” (more an espresso shot that a Venti Soy Caramel Macchiato, to expand the coffee-to-go metaphor). Treat’s book was another one that I regularly taught. Brevity is the word here. The “short short” prose pieces in A Robber in the House, are comprised of similarly brief-brief sentences. I was a fan of Gail Scott’s brief-brief sentences when I arrived in Minnesota, and Jessica Treat’s book gave me new and deep insights into this style of writing.