An Exchange of Quivers derives from a Navaho chant, lying somewhere between masque and ritual. Synchronicity, not cause and effect, holds sway, illuminating a no-man's land between thunder and speech, earth and understanding. A condor wakes from extinction as from a confused siesta: "The Babe the Babe is Born." In place of identifiable content the reader finds his own desperate poise, that instant which is paradise: "And the good man, so called, / has fixed the lightning rod / to his abode to divert / justice's divine wrathful power / and convert its fierce bolt / to a shield with the soul's / catastrophy embossed on it / as warning to the bad man / who, despised by men, / manifests the god's playful energy. / Anyway, he didn't buy-- / he's just renting the cottage'" And you, reader? You'll just have to use your illusion.

The Pueblo Indians and other Southwest tribes believe that the coyote can occur as a multiple of himself. Public Enemy stages this belief as a model for writing new texts from existing ones. A narrative-collage, Public Enemy frames the primordial myth of the cattle theft committed by the trickster-god Hermes within the 16th century Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes. Public Enemy portrays the wannabe cowherd and the downtrodden Lazarillo as coyotes. As it jumps from archaic to modern frames of reference, it appropriates The Public Enemy, the 1930 Warner Brothers film directed by William Wellman. The intercut film-text parodies the notion that the coyote is unkillable. The synergy between the different texts generates a cartoon-like, polyphonic effect.
The coyote may suffer bad luck / or just retribution in the form of starvation // "It's a fact that if I hadn't used all my cunning / and the tricks I knew, / I would have died of hunger more than once." // poisoning // "The real McCoy is hard to get." //dismemberment // "Who killed him?" //ingestion by monsters // "What's eating you?" //incineration // "Aw, nothing, I just got burned up that's all." //drowning // "I can drink it as long as you can pour it." // and fatal falls // "You always did get all the breaks."

This book mixes creation myth with trickster lore, recycled loony tunes: "His pliant wand flashes into speech. The path / runs off to become the path. Alloy / surpasses metal's prime. Its luster turns / waiting into a dance: the little god's ring / never did fit; now it's yours!" These thirteen poems are like wilier versions of Blake's Songs of Innocence, hymn fragments to a "big bad planet": "The sun takes a wild, prehistoric snapshot. / You can shoot back, but don't fool with the props. / The hare's hand-to-mouth-illusion; coyote's baby / pictures, cuteness gone awry. A high-speed pose is all" In Finders Keepers reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible: "Each design, if separate, proves / intractable; when combined / will yield the coyote's fine line, And quatrains' blur a solid wand. / Your crinkly ear emblem's fealty / to cipher's yammer, hip-hop 'signifire.'"