I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone

Moschovakis's playfully grim debut, a gathering of smart, sometimes puzzling poetic sequences, swears allegiance to fragments, open-ended inquiries, sudden juxtapositions and projects linked to analytic philosophy. The first sequence, "Thought Experiment," consists of slightly flirtatious short blocks of prose: "With progress, not only earthquakes but kisses will be predicted." Her last two, "Winter Songs" and the excellent "The Dead Man Looks into His Own Dead Ear," explore self-alienation and mourning in quirky, curt lines, distorting grammar as she goes: "Coiling around a stone/ in the posture of sleep/ I is getting wakier." Of the four sequences in between, the strongest, "The Blue Book," piles up single-line sentences as it vamps on queries from Ludwig Wittgenstein: "A language changes in appearances as I learn to decipher its characters." Moschovakis, an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, has crafted a mix of sparkling moments and baffling structures; her first sortie of philosophical investigations promises much more to come. (Oct.)