Recurring throughout Ruddy's The Sticks of Inquiry is a return to essential questions that, throughout history, have run the gauntlet of various academic disciplines and are here brought back home to a domestic, everyday application. Man's relationship to his immediate surroundings - his work, his family, the art he appreciates - is explored accessibly through language that reveals observational influences from Frank O'Hara's whimsical pondering to Tu Fu's concrete documenting. Ruddy isn't afraid to ask and, often, indulge the simple questions, making a case for the precise, immediate, and, yes, simple, moment being the ultimate thing that matters beyond all else, academic or otherwise. Ruddy's speakers rarely demand any more of their reader than listening, creating a comfortable relationship that allows themes to be digested at the reader's pace and on the reader's terms.