Barry Yourgrau, born in South Africa in 1949 and living in New York City for many, many years

A book of dozens and dozens of one and two page micro-fictions where you will encounter bizarre happenings of all varieties, casts, shapes and sizes: a man climbs inside a cow, gentlemen in tuxedos perch in a tree, a couple of girls are locked up in an aquarium, a man comes home to find his wife in bed with a squirrel, there’s a bathtub filled with rutabagas, it snowing in a living room, a man rents two brown bears, sheep graze on a supermarket roof. Welcome to the world of Barry Yourgrau, located at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealist art and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But wait, enough with the generalizations; here are the openings lines from three twisted Barry snappers:

HULA HORROR
It’s very late at night – very early in the morning. I’m in a thatched-roof hut. Earthen floor. Kerosene lamp. A girl – a fellow tourist – has gotten drunk and is now dancing just for me, lasciviously as she can manage, in the middle of the place. She sways and bobs, come-hither style. She’s stripped off her clothing and is attired solely in a ‘native’ grass hula skirt, colored pink.

I drink, as I have copiously all evening; the gramophone squalls, the lamp throws a melodramatic light, harsh, utterly black in the shadows. I keep time with my glass, thinking, Man, the brochures don’t tell you about this, and then a horrible realizations pops into my mind, like a window shade flying up. That pink skirt, I realize, my skin turning icy – that pink skirt is hideously evil: it’s an instrument of black magic, a voodoo booby-trap planted here on us two boozed-up, wooly-brained tourists.

VILLAGE LIFE
Country girls, red-cheeked and buxom, stand feet wide apart at a counter. They lean on it, elbows propped, forearms crossed. They chat. Their skirts are gathered above their waists.

An old man plods down the line of them with a bucket. He reaches in between the thighs of each girl and puts the fruit he brings out into the bucket. The girls laugh. The atmosphere is easy. They mock the old man, they make cracks and someone ruffles his few hairs.

ARS POETICA
A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent hatch in the man’s throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man beings to recite – a wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a forbidden voyage.

“So this is how poetry is made,” I think. “What are some other ways?
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And as a mini-tribute to my love of Barry’s wildly inventive fiction, I wrote this little prose poem:

THE QUAGMIRE
Barry is stuck in a real quagmire. He just performed his act which ended with his mounting a sheep and afterwards slitting its throat and hurling the sheep out a third story window. The women organizers of his performance, much to his surprise, found his act disagreeable right from the start. They went ahead and called the police. The officers could see blood smeared all over the walls and floor. “Sir, we invited him to perform his flash fiction. We never expected anything like this!” In his turn, Barry told the officers about a bog of emotion and a marshland of gut feelings that must be expressed in more than just words. The police didn’t buy a word of it and hauled him away. What an abysmal ending to his performance. Barry has landed himself in a real quagmire. He has a nut to crack and no sheep to crack it with.