It was refreshing to find in the middle of the book this untitled poem about commas:
Commas are tadpoles
that surface for breath
when read.
and then a poem titled “&”:
Asking for more,
the ampersand is a squatting monk
who holds up a begging bowl.
He sits in for “and,”
who always wants more too.
Leach looked closely at the punctuation marks’ appearance and function and gave them life. Corncurls includes more punctuation poems, including the @ (“at”) which came out of utter obscurity—it wasn’t even on typewriter keyboards!—to rule the digital age. I used to work with an Israeli engineer who called @ the “strudel.”
