Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hôtel is a splendid book. The Splendide-Hôtel ('built in a chaos of glaciers and the polar night'), invented by Arthur Rimbaud and reinvented by Sorrentino is a place in the country of a poet's mind where people and poems come to stay for a while, perhaps forever. Sorrentino's heart rests there a spell to render alphabetically the Splendide-Hôtel and its guests and its pests (so many rats as to take over the whole world.) The alphabeticalness is important because it's simple and because the words a poet writes are things made of alphabet elements where vowels are the sounding spaces.

Splendide-Hôtel is altogether a 'radiant gist' and Sorrentino pays homage in this book to Williams and Rimbaud whose spinnings of art into the matter of the quotidian—and here my dictionary tells me with astonishing accuracy to this content, that the 'quotidian'...