Three Hundred Streets of Venice California

Walking the grid of Venice streets, Tom Laichas wanders dreamscape, landscape, and self-portrait. Among these prose poems are wry fables: gnarled parkway trees plotting against the Bureau of Street Services; a derelict commercial property that has witnessed all Five Ages of Man; a peacock strutting for months, unhurried and unharmed, across rush-hour boulevards. Here, too, are anxiety and sorrow: streets that forget the names of their dead; neighbors who wonder whether, above the city's illuminated midnight sky, there really are stars. Laichas's imagery is precise and haunting, whether he is describing a mountainous island that looms across the southern horizon or a stray chicken loose from a front-yard coop. In this collection, Venice Beach is entangled with its urban others, from Italy's Renaissance republic to modern Florida's Gulf Coast resort. Yet each Venice street is itself another Venice: "Some cities are cities just once. Some are cities again and again."