Poetry. "Tender Buttons meets Two Serious Ladies: in this beautiful debut, Ellen Baxt deftly and musically portrays the manifold opportunities for disorientation that obtain only when one is dwelling, for the first time, in a foreign tongue. Tragicomically blue, her ravishing linguistic experiment has the enigmatic power of a Josef Sudek photo; she lifts the postcard and the primer to the new, crypto-nostalgic heights"--Wayne Koestenbaum. ANALFABETO/AN ALPHABET was written in Recife, Brazil, and Brooklyn, New York. Part dictionary, part travel diary, and part historical record, it crosses...