Many years ago, a particularly pompous ass of a professor told Michael Jay Tucker that he needed to "focus." It is a very good thing for those of us who are his readers that Tucker elected to ignore the tenured twit. Simply put, Tucker has been all over the literary map and shows no signs of slowing down now. And in this collection we have Tucker at his eclectic best-short stories, flash fictions, prose poems and verse poems succeed each other with a bewildering and wonderful variety. Here we have something like purest domestic comedy ("The Unicorn, The Mime, The Man Of Middle Age"). There we have a story that begins as a simple tale of an unpleasant encounter in a charity shop... that somehow morphs into a meditation on the dangers of political discourse in an irrational age ("When She Is An Old Woman"). And, then, just a little further on, we have a complicated tale in which characters step from their pages to address the reader, and discuss the nature of artistic creation ("Psi). Ah, but there's more Flip a few pages forward and we have some first-rate examples of the nearly lost art of literary revenge ("To the Tenured Professor on the Occasion of Her Complete Victory," "Salt"). It's worth the cost of admission just to watch Tucker sharpening up his (figurative) knives Then, finally, as a complete change of pace, we have Tucker at his most romantic, with tender, and sometimes quite erotic, love poetry and flash fictions ("on an island otherwise invisible," "Bath"). These and much more await you in this striking book. So, take a deep breath, prepare yourself, and enter the complicated world of Psionic Beasts and Women Who Must Not Wear Purple.