The best book I’ve read on the world after September 11 was published in 1991 – two years before the initial bombing of the World Trade

Center. The volume is a collection of prose poems posing as essays, or perhaps the other way round, written from the position of a world in which nuclear weapons have been loosened from the grips of nation states and come into the hands of people who might actually think to use them. Some of the aspects of this 262-page work, which includes a long sequence titled (or perhaps subtitled) “Muslims in Soho,” seem positively eerie in their anticipation of details that have subsequently become far too familiar.

When it was first published, James Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage (Roof), did not receive a lot of comment and I suspect that many readers didn’t know how to take this dense and dour volume that comes with not one but four appendices. Much of the work here is pitched carefully halfway between irony and ambivalence – a deadpan stance that underscores the horror of recognition at the heart of this book. Nuclear Heritage is not currently listed on the Roof Books site (http://roofbooks.com/Catalog/) and may well be out of print. To make matters worse, abebooks.com (http://abebooks.com/) doesn’t show any copies available through its network of used and rare book dealers. But in 2002, Our Nuclear Heritage is an absolutely a must-read book. Try your small-press-friendly university library.

Sherry hasn’t published a lot of poetry since Heritage, spending much of the past decade producing an equally long and dense work on the environment, tentatively titled Sorry. There’s new work in the latest issue of Chain (http://www.temple.edu/chain/9_toc.htm) on Sherry’s own horrific experiences on September 11 of last year – his office is just two blocks from Ground Zero – and on the implications of globalism and its cognates on postmodernity and the religions of the book alike.