This call to presence might initially seem to be at odds with the book’s fixation on the past. The real Key Bridge spans the Potomac, and the book Key Bridge is a stuttering, elliptical survey of the texture, history, and strife of Ken’s native home of Washington D.C.. But this is not a museum-culture survey, history under dusty glass: Ken rips D.C. from its historical moorings and rejuvenates it with cinematic jump cuts; jags of overheard vernacular; montage-like splices of time, place, event, so the book becomes less about history than about a mind actively engaged with it, in a process that is living and ongoing. The dated entries comprise less of a temporal sequence than a series of rip-ups and start-agains, each a sortie against some chink in D.C.’s armor, trying to pierce its veiled heart. Ken courses through D.C.’s incandescence (“D.C. light crests on lampposts/ ripples through streets/ ripples through buildings/ through trees/ through cars/ through clothes/ ripples through you”), inhabits its sky (“way far from D.C. & way below, a river winds/ through a pancake middle”), plies its streams (“trips downstream with my parents & sister in/ from the suburbs through Rock Creek Park”), scales its architecture (“A low brick tower/ with turrets/ in the middle of the Northwest/ suburbs atop the hill end/ of Fort Reno Park”). A dream city sprouts like a dark garden, ever shifting, ever unsettled.

Like Barthelme’s Paraguay, this D.C. cannot be found on any maps. This D.C. only exists as a teeming chamber in Ken’s mind, for which his words are “an entrance, a door jamb/ from which to survey the room.” And so it is a jumble––quoted speech, geographical detail, Chamber of Commerce-caliber civic data collation, sense impressions, snippets of music, news items both pithy and mundane, the susurrus of streams and the “(whup, (whup, (whup” of helicopters blur into one stream-of-consciousness ramble through a dream D.C. parallel to the waking, collective one. Along the way, we meet a couple of Jennies, many bridges and rivers, crooks and cops, Lee Boyd Malvo (“shooting star”) and John Allen Muhammad, some herons and rooks, Tom Waits and John Wilkes Booth, Amos and Andy, Francis Scott Key, Artemis and Diana, Pierre L’Enfant and Muhammad Ali. All of these and more stride in Bunyanesque proportion to the mercurial landscapes they inhabit––whatever their actual relationship to the actual D.C., in Key Bridge, they become as sentinels, tirelessly treading the bounds of the city’s mythology. Their orbits give Ken’s D.C. its nebulous shape while simultaneously illuminating its conflicts.