In You Don't Say

Edward Cifelli collects 68 previously published essays and fugitive thoughts. It is a miscellany that records some of the things, large and small, that have claimed his attention between 2012 and 2017, between his 70th and 75th birthdays—and his attention ranges far and wide, from Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama to Joe Maddon and the Ronettes; from Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Keurig coffee makers and New York Times crossword puzzles; from the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the discovery of the God Particle to lottery statistics and lost golf balls. Part of the fun of the book is its crazy quilt of the important and unimportant—and how they look after Cifelli stops to think about them.

From Whining Poets: They attend each other's readings and pretend there is a place for them someplace else in the literate universe. That is delusional, but it's a fiction they all hold on to—just as they hold on to the idea that they are under-read and under-appreciated. Their usual posture is a sort of hang-dog look of disappointment and lofty superiority, a difficult combination that they manage with the same irritating panache observed in perpetually misunderstood teenagers.