The several essays that comprise Border Towns chase, worry, and trouble ideas about situation and reference. As a group, the essays topics color, lycanthropy, African-Canadian history, cooking, public transit, etc. make an unlikely field. But through all its pages the book traces and describes acts of situation; and for all its werewolves, green-grocers, and paeans to miscegenation and migration its interest is not in capturing but in the shape of reference itself. The title figure of the border town serves as a beard for the unassimilable. The author, whose other Dalkey books are poetry books, writes, The mistake or the short-sightedness is to perceive border towns as finite or one-to-one compositions, or as places where monoliths stretch and mingle; or stare at one another ..Perhaps at best is border town the term the gesture toward something that s actually untenable or untenably awkward.
So Border Towns the book of essays is perhaps, finally, a book about poetry. ( It often seems to me, writes the author, that one of the best uses to which prose can be put is describing poetry. )"