Topic Sentence

Author: Stan Persky

Publisher: New Star Books (2007)

A first clue to how this book is going to work lies in the book's title: Topic Sentence. In the title story, written in 1970, Persky took on the two questions that dog every artist in the post–modern: What is the subject matter, and how can it be articulated? Since both questions are unanswerable, Persky twists them: How am I supposed to isolate the subject matter from the myriad of things in which it is lodged, and how do I elude the distortions of conventional exposition and its self–serving selectivity? How do I make what I write as alive and dynamic as the things I write about?