America: A Prophecy is the long awaited collection from the writer Robert Christgau called, "one of the funniest men in Manhattan." From a hilarious spiritual guide to New York City--written after Sparrow tried meditating at a dozen high-traffic landmarks--to the scientific and religious significance of the sky, Sparrow's unique blend of wit and wisdom gives readers a whole new way of seeing our country at the crossroads. The author of Republican Like Me, Sparrow challenged Bob Dole for the presidential nomination in 1996 and, remarkably, lost. America: A Prophecy is his follow up, a fantastical look at a country in flux by a mischievous poet and iconoclastic comedian.

Sparrow created quite a stir in 1995 when he picketed The New Yorker magazine, holding a placard reading, "My Poetry is as bad as yours." His poetry has since appeared in that magazine as well as The Quarterly, The New York Times and other erudite journals. He was also featured in the PBS series The United States of Poetry and can be heard, along with his legendary band Foamola, on the poetry compilation Poemfone: New Word Order (Tomato). He is a gossip columnist for the Phoenicia Times, a contributing editor to Chronogram, a substitute teacher, and the author of two books: Yes, You ARE a Revolutionary! Plus Seven Other Books and Republican Like Me (both Soft Skull Press). Sparrow lives with his wife and daughter in the hamlet of Phoenicia, New York, in the Catskill Mountains.

Marcus Boon (editor) specializes in contemporary literature and theory. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard UP, 2002) which was called "an impressive display of scholarship" by the Boston Globe and a "valuable, philosophically provocative and sometimes quite moving work of literary criticism" by the Denver Post. He writes about music and sound for The Wire and is an Assistant Professor of English at York University in Toronto, Canada.

What I Read
by Sparrow

One day I told Kevin Kelly I only read magazines I find in the garbage, and that I was presently in an article in the Fall 1988 Florida State magazine (for FSU alumni) about a football coach, Bill Peterson, famous for his slips of tongue, who in fact had invented the same proverb I had: "Let sleeping bags lie." (He also said: "Don't burn your bridges at both ends", "Don't look a sawhorse in the mouth", "You guys line up alphabetically by height," and "This is the greatest country in America.")
Kevin asked me to write about what I read, and I responded with obsession: typing up salient passages of my readings over the course of a year (mostly newspapers and 13th century Chinese poetry) until I had 440 pages - and growing! Suddenly I realized I'd written a book. On the way, I learned that dipping ping pong balls in hot water returns their resiliency (Hints From Heloise, Daily News, May 2); that up until the 1930's, schoolbuses could be any color (Newsday, April 26); that Elton John's gay name is Sharon; (People, Dec. 5, 1988); that Dik Browne, the creator of "Hagar The Horrible", "looked like Hagar The Horrible (Times, June 5); that Batman and Robin were originally called "Birdman" and "Scamp" (Post, May 28); that George Bush was the first president to visit Hungary (Newsday, July 13); that over 2 million dogs and cats disappear each year in the U.S. (Our Town, July 2); that a nude car wash was closed in Jacksonville, Fla. (USA Today, July 6); that Betty Crocker put an egg back in the "lazy baker" recipe to involve consumers (New York, May 8); that Charlie Parker never listened to jazz at home (People, Dec. 5); that before the War Brides Act of 1949, the Chinese community in America was 96% male (Newsday, July 21); that Frank Zappa's father was a chemist for the military who volunteered to be experimented on (Post, May 21) and that Dr. Ruth said: "It is possible for women to enjoy quick sex. You can train your body and mind to respond faster if you want to!" (USA Today, June 16)
I also learned that Doc Severinsen and Miles Davis's fathers were both dentists (Parade, July 23, It's Hip, July); that at Bennington College, W. H. Auden ate cold cereal at every meal (Times Magazine, May 14); that Jasper Johns' first American flag painting came to him in a dream (Times Magazine, June 19); that camels pulled lawnmowers in Central Park in the 19th century (City Edition 1986/87); that Keith Richards briefly changed his name to Keith Richard (New York Press, Oct. 20); that Wilbur Wright was a fine harmonicist (USA Today, June 23); and that Donald Trump, asked if he would consider devoting the rest of his life to Good Works, replied somberly: "I'm looking for a disease." (Daily News, Feb. 8)
Bill Peterson composed by having a kind of verbal dyslexia, and I wrote my proverbs by combining objects in a room: 'Pencils cry when wastebakets sing.' Our results share the virtue of surprise. Which is the virtue of garbage. One of my goals in this essay is to encourage N. Americans to search the trash for words. (It seems incongruous that words can be discarded at all - that you can throw out Erasmus along with the inside of your toilet paper roll.) Imagine, I spent less than 5 cents to read all this. (In fact, I spent zero.) The vast majority of it went the same route: garbage - my mind, my journal, the cat box. (One Monday I decided it was foolish to throw away The New York Times and buy sand for the cats to shit in. So I shred my documents, like Oliver North, every 2 days, and bundle the used strips with jute rope. It seems appropriate for the cats to pee on The New York Times - perhaps because it pees on us.) In the December 5, 1988 People, the Greenwich Village pastry chef, Rose Beranbaum (author of The Cake Bible) tells of disposing of an unsuccessful cake when she meets her neighbor at the incinerator. "Don't you realize that your failures are our life's delights?" he shouts, and my whole book is made up of such 'failures.' (Ron Perambo, a writer for Albany's News, had a theory that Chinese restaurants serve food thrown out by Italian restaurants, which seems relevant here.) I see the garbage as an oracle, like the I Ching. Because it's random, it shares the quality of the yarrow sticks that cast the Ching, or the scared bolo beans in Santeria. In fact, when I studied with William Burroughs at the Naropa Institute in 1976, he assigned us to cut up news articles and reassemble them, with the theory that, "If you cut apart the present, the future leaks out." (One of my compositions featured an Indian chief marrying a computer, but I don't know if this has yet come to pass.) Rolling Stone's "The 100 Best Singles of the Last Twenty-Five Years" (Sept. 8, 1988) suggests that our whole culture now is based on such sudden strokes. These 100 Singles have usurped the Great Books as our basis of collective knowledge, and none of them were stormily labored at like A Pilgrim's Progress or Parsifal. They were dreamed up in 10 minutes next to a swimming pool (#1, "Satisfaction"), written on toilet paper (#18,"Louie, Louie"), improvised while drunk (#33, "When A Man Loves A Woman"), composed as jokes (#72, "Wild Thing") - in short they were found, too, amid the garbage of the singer's mind. Many of the great black songs are associated with crying ("Every time we sang that song the people in the audience would cry," Smokey Robinson said of "The Tracks Of My Tears") and many of the great white songs were intentionally silly ("Wooly Bully"). The moments one breaks down and cries, like the moments one is a fool, open a door, like opening the lid of a trashcan.
USA Today is to real papers what rock-n-roll is to Mozart: a bastardization, and yet with an inspirational goofiness. Jetcapade, where the editors go from country to country, asking the President of Switzerland if he likes chocolate, and creating such headlines as "Canada: Sportsmen, the French Love It", make whole nations into jokes. (Perhaps this could bring unity to the world, if all countries were systematically made silly.) The most amazing thing I read in that paper was an interview with Leontine Kelly, the first black woman elected bishop in the United Methodist Church, where they asked her: "Is it possible that God was a woman?" - using the past tense, as if God was either officially deceased, or had had a sex-change operation.