Recurring throughout Ruddy's The Sticks of Inquiry is a return to essential questions that, throughout history, have run the gauntlet of various academic disciplines and are here brought back home to a domestic, everyday application. Man's relationship to his immediate surroundings - his work, his family, the art he appreciates - is explored accessibly through language that reveals observational influences from Frank O'Hara's whimsical pondering to Tu Fu's concrete documenting. Ruddy isn't afraid to ask and, often, indulge the simple questions, making a case for the precise, immediate, and,...