I just heard about this book, Richard Loranger's Poems for Teeth, which is exactly what it sounds like: a book-length series of poems all about teeth. This sort of obsessiveness has great appeal for me. (I can hear y'all saying, No kidding, really??) I want to read this book. I'll be happy if it's even half as good as this other book-length poetic obsession I chanced upon in the Anderson Center library when I was there a couple years ago: Blind Huber by Nick Flynn, inspired by the life & work of a pioneering 18th-century beekeeper.

In theory, I s'pose I could have spent this year writing a book of poems about hands. Instead I have just learned how to say "I have an injured thumb" in Spanish. Tengo un pulgar herido. How's that for ambition?

Heaven:




I don't think about my thumb at all while I'm eating this stuff.

Accupuncture is also good, but I think a lot about my thumb while that's happening.

I'm not sure what that proves exactly.

Truly you have not lived until you've witnessed David Rawlings, backed by Gillian Welch, covering Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". Audience reaction: stunned silence followed by campy arm-waving & laughter, then total mayhem & screaming as the wonderful madness of it all irrevocably reorganized the molecules of everyone present. Dang!

Runner-up for Cover of the Day: the Knitters' frenzied psychobilly "Born To Be Wild".