SOURCE: Myers, George Jr. Review of A Transparent Tree: Fictions, by Robert Kelly. Small Press Review 18, no. 4 (April 1986): 6.

In the following review of A Transparent Tree, Myers compares Kelly to Italo Calvino and Leo Lionni.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes an imaginary city where images of things are emblematic of other things. In Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany, a book describing imaginary plants, a species of shrub shrinks as viewers approach it. Thus, close inspection is impossible; perspective never changes. Robert Kelly's new fiction collection, A Transparent Tree: Fictions, is very like Calvino and Lionni's plants and cities: His tales are riddles wrapped in enigmas.

Like the Oriental wonder box in which one container reveals a yet smaller one, Kelly's stories are endless pursuits of ciphers and codes—clues to nothing, really, which are forged into somethings by the fire of Kelly's spectacular imagination.

But what is that...