This book burns. There is a quality, a Bildungsroman that ends with what is less a period than an opening, similar to Blake's picture on his blog, a peeking through a keyhole. He takes out the key here, and bids the reader 'Hello' at the end. Which is to say, there is sustenance in memory, what Lyn Hejinian might call writing as an aid to a vital memory, one that belongs to a visionary with a perspective that is not just about perspective, but about being in the now and writing of the search to plunder mines with a shovel. These vignettes are not actually vignettes, but they are, as Jesse Ball says, “a series of maps.” And in these maps we find jewels and the remnants of jewels—what it would have been like to be royal, to own, though without the props that would hold up a reading of a shrugged map. For Blake doesn't shrug, and his rendering of the atlas is a fire, though not a Promethean one. There is something about knowledge here, but it's not quite what one would expect: for example, the idea of time. Blake writes that “There couldn't be much time. Time, the ship, the shit, the sentence.” What would a semiotician do with this? We come to the prior space, the Kantian imperative of pure, to the epic ship, which he sinks in this book, admirably so. But it's shit. There's shit on the ship, and maybe he recognizes this as the ship continues to applaud its voyage, the path toward home that somehow we know is mistaken. The sentence comes next. And what is a sentence? It's unknown, really, but we do know that there will be an end. And then there is a wall: “The wall was still there in the evening and the next morning into noon.” Also: “The wall's words got louder.” This has to be language. Language, as we might know from reading theory, makes a wall, a visible or perceptible screen. And Blake's wall wants things, this Other. He (or she) asks for gifts, for names. So that is this knowledge, this burning of knowledge, in refusing to name anything but the Brother at the end, the idea he had of a Brother, a twin. Maybe a bird. Featherproof is the press, and why not a bird (or several)? Blake writes of How the Birds Flew, their goings, their “metal, thorn and neon.” He says that they “nuzzle deep inside me, their squawk becoming logic, ways I know.” But what does one know, and what does one do? Listen: here in these houses. And Blake's poems have houses. There's a smoke house, a wordless house, and this too is a poem. He had dreamt of becoming Mother in the television house. And there's a flesh house with a red morning in its tendrils, delicate, one paragraph, emotion. There are also water damaged photos of what it means to leave a house, an opening into the aperture of a wound. Mother's handwriting, the stings on teeth, what it is to go: all these things take on an appearance of a wet tattoo with no ending. And yet, in the glitter, there is an alive sky, some kind of shimmer moving through non-existent trees, whose rustle bothers the shadows.