The Orangery, a collection of 84 liberally formed sonnets, each containing a variation of the word "orange," is not about orange. True enough, though, as Sorrentino says in one of these poems, "These oranges hold it all."

Non sequiturs as sequiturs, sequiturs as non sequiturs, are here "absolute logic." You are, when you read this, entering a world where experience is what it is. Not yours. Yet you are invited in even when you are not "invited" in. "Nothing is the thing that rhymes with orange," the poet tells us—and don't look for reason either. (p. 327)

Here you arrive at a place, places, as indefinite as those places which, in William Blakes world, synthesize into geographic-imaginative-spiritual locations. And the method too is not dissimilar; there is a network of words which are repeated in different contexts, which do not mean, when they recur, the same thing in any...