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Excerpt fromOx-Pull: Canaan Fairgreat-flanked oxen knew the drag, the burden man devised beyond his strength to pull. Now lever, wheel, and piston make a spectacle... Philip Booth at the Academy of American Poets Philip Booth at the Poetry Foundation One of the remarkable things about a book, whether it's a book of short stories or a book of poems or whatever book it may be, is that it is there for you to go back to over and over again. And I find myself, as many people do, becoming more and more of a re-reader. Not because I’ve read everything that's brave and beautiful and new, or brave and beautiful and old, but because I want the reassurance of the book being there to resustain me, reinvigorate me, literally offer me a kind of recreation by its very being. And I think that Chekhov particularly—though I like a great number of the Russian writers-seems to get to the essence of human experience marvelously rapidly, with total illusion of casualness, in story after story after story. Five poems
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