This esoteric collection, awarded the second annual Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is described by contest judge Robert Polito as “astonishing,†a “dismantling and reinvention of the essay as an instrument for thought.†Readers are bound to agree; in his first nonfiction book, poet and novelist Monson (Vacationland
) offers a parade of quirky, at times avant-garde methods for exploring his obsessions with everything from Frisbee golf (“The Long Crushâ€) to car washes (“The Big and Sometimes Colored Foam: Four Annotated Car Washesâ€) to the lost art of sending telegrams (“Afterword: Elegy for Telegram and Starflight
â€). He pits working-class values against those of Michigan's suburban upper crust—grappling with his own point throughout—in “Cranbrook Schools: Adventures in Bourgeois Topologies,†an ironic, seminostalgic look at his preexpulsion years in an elite boarding school. In “Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline,†a well-crafted outline unpacks the history of mining in northern Michigan. “Index for X and the Origin of Fires†is perhaps the best of the bunch; Monson explains it in his notes as “the original index to my novel, Other Electricities
, before it was trimmed out and became this something else. One hopes it still refers to a (or the) recognizable world.†Wonderfully recondite and cunningly executed, Monson's work will make a brilliant discovery for open-minded fans of narrative nonfiction. (Feb.)