Fiction. charged "short-short" stories that take the reader to Italy, Greece, Africa, and finally into the imagination itself. This first book of fiction by celebrated poet Kenneth Koch explores new terrain with stories rendered in prose that is as suggestive as it is precise. Koch transcends the brevity of these one-to-one page pieces by creating an emotional resonance that remains in the reader's mind. The collection follows the life of a traveller/exile in a trek across continents, examining the every-day nature of the exotic. Throughout, Koch creates a quiet, introspective serenity; the deep interior of the self, in a sense, also becomes a foreign and curiously distant ground.