Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Kurt Luchs writes about Tributaries, his new hybrid collection out from Sagging Meniscus.
If Tributaries were a cocktail, you’d be on your fourth one before you realized how dizzy it was making you.
If Tributaries were a car repair shop, it would write you a deeply insightful literary essay explaining exactly what was wrong with your vehicle and how e. e. cummings would’ve fixed it in 1920.
If Tributaries were a weathervane, it would be pointing precisely in the direction from which the wind was not blowing.
If Tributaries were a pair of earrings, when one accidentally fell off, you would search under the bed and find, not the one you lost, but a better one previously owned by Hilda Doolittle.
If Tributaries were a parrot, it would swear like a sailor for several minutes before breaking into a complete and word-perfect recitation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
If Tributaries were a metaphor, it would secretly wish that it was a simile instead, for slightly greater clarity.
If Tributaries were an allen wrench, closer inspection would possibly reveal it to be, in fact, an alien wrench.
If Tributaries were a kitten, it would not resemble either of its parents.
If Tributaries were a talk show, the host would be Marcel Marceau.
If Tributaries were another book altogether, it might be The Poem in its Skin by Paul Carroll.
Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com and https://www.facebook.com/kurt.luchs/) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. Sagging Meniscus Press published his humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), his poetry collections Falling in the Direction of Up (2021) and Death Row Row Row Your Boat (2024), and his latest book, the hybrid Tributaries: Essays & Verses Flowing from & Celebrating Favorite Poems (2025). He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Buy a copy of Tributaries here.