Reading Sam Shepard, for me, is tantamount to being knocked off of my feet by a flash flood. Whisked through canyons and desert and dry river beds. Coyotes barking, eagles soaring overhead, snakes slithering past. Blazing sun and horizontal snow. Damaged characters waiting for my arrival. Waiting to damage me. An unprotected world. Unprotected shelter, unprotected wildlife, unprotected sex, unprotected thoughts, unprotected consequences. The curse of the starving class. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I love reading Sam Shepard. ( )

The foreword by Patti Smith was incomprehensible, which forewarned me that the book itself, when I got to it, would be unusual. Smith was trying hard to channel the rhythm and slant-ness of Shepard's writing, and failed. Her attempt, though, points out the difficulty of saying anything definitive about what Shepard has written here.

The experience of reading Shepard's prose was so interesting. The words I was reading evoked strong memories in me of things I hadn't thought about for years, and that had nothing to do with the words on the page. I gave up trying to understand exactly what was going on. The strange jittering fragmentation of the story, with its many guilt-laden meanders into regret for the past, carried me into meanings that might not have had anything to do with what the author wrote. ( )