Detained by the Authorities

Author: David Treadway Manning
Publisher: Pudding House Chapbook Series
ISBN: 1-58998-492-7
$10

In this rowdy and sometimes irreverent collection a reporter witnesses a creepy electric-chair survival, a restaurant patron describes a men's room encounter with a Mafia godfather, and a venturesome novice attends a bizarre campfire gathering of postmodern poets.

The reader is rewarded with a helpful fill-in form to ease the annual task of a Christmas letter and, along with reading group colleagues, is put to the test by a noisy hearing-aid. The musically-inclined may identify with a nighttime backyard piano concert and a steam calliope serenade from a stern-wheeler on a West Virginia river.

Here are poems to muss the coiffures and undo the straight laces of many.