Tracking the elusive self -- the ultimate subject of all narratives -- into ever more personal territory, Robert Kelly presents twenty-five new fictions to surprise even his wariest readers. All but one composed since Cat Scratch Fever, each story shares the urge to break constraints of linear thought in the reconstruction of experience. The stories tell of strange encounters with desires in its many forms: cosmography, bestiary, heroic mythology. Included are two novella-length works: "In Irish America" explores all of our displaced immigrant yearnings, men and women caught in the eloquent fantasies we spin in poverty and exile. The thirty-two chapters sing out loud, escaping into image-filled music. "The Red King," a subtle meditation on the poetics of politics, completes the book, complementing Kellys famous "Cities" (in the earlier volume A Transparent Tree). Here, a man of enigmatic, gentle omnipotence re-inherits his own body touch-by-touch. Best known for his well-regarded avant-garde poetry, Kelly also publishes "fictions," of which these are the latest. They are essentially prose poems evasive in denotative meaning yet containing considerable emotional impact. This book's shorter pieces appear in the odd-numbered of its five sections and range from a bystander's description of the emotional meaning of Rimbaud's return from Ethiopia to lyrical evocations of lost love to meditations on pouring tea. Sections two and four are extended sequences: "The Red King," an extended meditation by a nameless king on childhood, power, and the difficulty of doing good works; and "In Irish America," a musical and opaque evocation of Irishness and its relationship to America. In all, an item with greatest appeal for those interested in the slightly offbeat. John Shreffler Kelly (Cat Scratch Fever, 1991, etc.), long a poetic innovator, continues to prove himself equally prolific and adept at ``fictions.'' Incorporating neither character nor plot, these 24 cerebral pieces meditate on the lofty and the mundane. From the opening story, ``Rimbaud Back from Abyssinia,'' Kelly makes it clear to whom he speaks: an informed, literary reader who is familiar not only with Rimbaud's poetry but with his life. Many pieces show Kelly involved in a struggle to take the courtly concepts he's handled so well in his poetry and merge them with a thoroughly modern sensuality that incorporates schlock culture, the mystical, and the primitive. ``They call death the King of Terrors, and I'm telling you who his queen is. Sex is the Queen,'' he says in the work which gives the volume its title. Time and again, the writer/philosopher seeks to bond with nature: The adult crosses the wind's fence, last barrier between himself and the sea; the child leans out a window, desperate to learn how birds fly. Sex elicits nature metaphors as well; in ``Red Crow'' the narrator's tongue massages a loved one ``like a little wet animal looking for a nest.'' Kelly's erudite playfulness is easiest to see in ``The Red King,'' simply because this novella- length work permits each element more room to vie for attention. But far more interesting (i.e., accessible) is the volume's other long piece, ``In Irish America,'' which traces his ancestry and places Celtic symbology beside flaccid contemporary references, mercilessly contrasting the legendary warriors who thought they would soon ``die, drip of our wounds... and go to America'' with his own birth in the United States. An excellent sampling of Kelly's diversity and a must-read for his coterie of followers, this volume will win him few, if any, converts. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Invites readers ... through the process of creation: a persona, a stance in the world, a way of coping with life. -- James Polk, Woodstock Times To enter Kelly s world is to confront a place of surprising whimsies, spiritual meditations, and...terrors. -- Norman Weinstein, Lost Angeles Reader s Monthly Book Supplement Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn on September 24, 1935. He attended CCNY and Columbia University, and since 1961 has taught at Bard College. In addition to publishing four fiction collections and three special editions with McPherson & Company, over forty volumes of his poetry have appeared, the major collections having been published by Black Sparrow Press, including Kill the Messenger, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1980. Kelly also has been Poet in Residence at California Institute of Technology and Tufts University, and presently he teaches in the writing program Bard College.