GEOGRAPHY OF THE FOREHEAD

Molly Is Asked to be in the Christmas pageant. She tells me this standing in the door of what we laughingly call my study. "But I don't want to be Mary," she says. "I want to be the guy." That makes me look up from my bills. "Joseph?" "The innkeeper. I want to slam the door in Joseph's face." She's eight. I wonder if we'll look back on this next year and laugh. Or will she want to be Herod and we'll have to take her little brother and flee. ....................................................................................................................................................................... Nobody writes poetry like Ron Koertge - nobody has the nerve. From short, acerbic lyrics to hilarious prose poems about nutty German professors and Dracula's teenage girlfriend, readers laugh out loud at simple turns of phrase before they are jerked sober by startling insights into the way we live - and Koertge knows how we live. Nothing in American culture is safe from the scythe of his irony - not Joan Crawford, not Superman, nor Frank Sinatra. He lampoons our literary heroes and historical giants with the gentlest touch, and we find ourselves grinning before we realize that Koertge is redefining what we thought we knew. His poems are alternately funny or poignantly sad because they are always true, and that truth lingers long after the reading is over. In Geography of the Forehead, Ron Koertge offers us nearly sixty poems, each a brilliant testament to the human condition. "Though he has been writing his influential and highly original poems for many years," Charles Harper Webb declares, "he is still something of a secret: a poet of dazzling wit, and surprising sweetness. With this collection, however, the secret is out."