The several essays that comprise "Border Towns" chase, worry, and trouble ideas about situation and reference. As a group, the essays topics color, lycanthropy, African-Canadian history, cooking, public transit, etc., make an unlikely field. But through all its pages the book traces and describes acts of situation; and for all its werewolves, green-grocers, and paeans to miscegenation and migration its interest is not in capturing but in the shape of reference itself.

The title figure of the border town serves as a beard for the unassimilable. The author, whose other Dalkey books are...