Jack Foley's autobiography begins, "What is a life but stories?" The stories collected here are not his life but a fantastic consciousness in which he is as lost as anyone. Foley writes what he does not know; he writes what he can imagine. The dead sprout up here as easily as leaves of grass. Stylistically the stories range widely -- some are comic, some bring tears. All manifest "the strangeness and the power of poetry", plunging us into the enigma of the human heart.