Who Was Cousin Alice? & Other Questions attempts to answer both the first question posed in the title about American poet John Matthias' early family memories, and then to raise and engage, in a series of memoirs and critical essays, a large number of "other questions." These range from an attempt to find some answers about his wife's British family in 'Kedging in Kedging in Time, ' an essay-memoir first published as an afterword to his long poem, Kedging, about the Adams and Young families during and after World War I, to memoirs inquiring into "Poetry and Insomnia," "Poetry and Murder," and...

Different Kinds of Music follows Timothy "Westy" Westmont through six episodes from his childhood and youth, through his experiences as an archivist and a thief, to encounters with William Faulkner's bear in St. Louis, Hemingway's lingering ghost at Walloon Lake in Michigan, and Phillip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus in Columbus, Ohio itself. The narrative is sometimes funny, sometimes sad; and it progresses in an order more interesting than the merely chronological. Between the episodes appears a sequence of interchapters about music, the different kinds of which define Westmont's experience from...