“Ann Fine dreams two dreams here, a short one and a very long one, and like the good doctor said they can be read as cause and effect.  “A pillow inquiry” is buoyant and airy, still intensely tinged by eros (or its ghost), and like good pillow talk its tautologies recall the jokes pleasure told the lover about how superfluous mere logic might be.  The long aftermath is prose, mulling its way down the page of that past, dear diary, haunted by the memory and possible return of a you not merely shadow.  Meanwhile, logic’s sadly become as necessary as it is unavailing—“pain,” Frank O’Hara said, “always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”  Here tautology becomes the rueful mark of that restless knowledge, a joke on the self; but also a hint or hope that as thinking exhausts itself something else might return. Which it does, though it’s not the longed for past, but what lay under it, finally glimpsed: “There is also a small door in the air, almost invisible, oh much less; pine breathing. I do not have the power or desire to shut such a door. I awake in its opening. In the last moments, the sun leaves me alone, to say it is so.”  Ann Fine’s self-erasing project here is canny and funny, lovely and brave, wise and hard-won.  This is a beautiful book.” — Tenney Nathanson