Now & Again: The Ecstatic Doggerel of Samuel Beast

Now & Again is a challenge for those who must classify books. Even a single sentence could be defined as poetry, fiction, myth or essay: "Here we meet Ever who is always true, whose words give shape to the physics of sound, whose sight is the constant of light, whose touch defines the invisible lines on the one face of gravity, momentum, inertia and space." Samuel Beast, himself, exists just as a character in Now & Again, but he's the character who's supposed to be writing the book. In the short story, A Cameo Appearance by Sentience, Beast encounters a being who calls herself Sentience or sometimes Prank. He asks if she is "just an illusion, something I'm making up at this very moment?" She replies, "On the contrary, it's taken me since the beginning of time to manifest you so that you could be mine. I've grown your bones out of stones, nerves out of cob-webs, muscles and tendons out of stalks in fields and your skin from the petals of wildflowers."