Secretary of the Invisible Thing

The Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner.
Writers are more porous than impermeable. In Secretary of the Invisible Thing (a phrase from Czeslaw Milosz), Lance Larsen tests this claim, not dictating so much as taking dictation. In Larsen’s case, this includes feeling haunted by his daughter’s dead name, by a greedy river whispering bring me a horse, by Anne Sexton’s favorite palindrome (“Rats live on no evil star”), by William Blake seeing angels in his garden, even by a stray cat in Florence who “speaks almost no Italian.” What better way to be both enchanted and bedeviled? What better way to celebrate Earth’s “broken backfiring beauty”?