Uneven, as any "collected works" will be, this is an excellent volume, full of great work. I had thought the half dozen or so small books and chapbooks of his I already own were definitive, but it turns out that's not so. This humble man has written three large volumes of genre-stretching works of consistently high quality. I'm glad the collected works has appeared, to fill in the blanks of this important, though hopelessly obscure, American writer. I'm in the process of procuring (and then reading) the other two volumes. My best reading experience of 2008! ( )