Introduction

Reading Rodney Wittwer's collection, Border Reports, I think of Ovid, that greatest of outlaw poets—and the poet who must have had the most fun of all. And I think of Elvis Costello, and Abbott and Costello, and an entire parade of brilliant satirists, word dancers, all the fish-eye-lensed chroniclers of the absurdity and beauty of the world , who can't help--despite themselves and the brutal facts of our private and public histories—but celebrate the thing itself, the real life, and add their voices to the great singing that binds us over time and circumstance. Or as Wittwer writes, "It is/singing that keeps this/in tune, or not." Wittwer is one of our great singers, and he is keeping things in tune for all of us; no matter how strange, how utterly original, how flip or fancy, how dark or danceable these poems are, they all over-brim the cup with life—fiery, intimate, contemporary life. As with Ovid's, Wittwer's is our unofficial story; it is a jagged, ever-changing and often frightening one that seems to bustle with lunatics of all types, but also with love and extraordinary tenderness.

—David Daniel