The Book of Fortune By Daniel Mark Epstein Overlook/ Viking, 64 pp., $10.95
The flight from Boston to Kansas City, with a stop at O’Hare, would occupy four hours or so. I packed Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Book of Fortune for the TWA aisle seat, not to mention for reading in the Ramada Inn. Not until I was parking the car at Logan did I discover that I had failed to bring along my reading glasses. Of course my hosts at Emporia would find me glasses for my poetry reading—the affliction is as common as achieving one’s fifties—but I faced four hours at thirty thousand feet without being able to read. Then, by a lucky stroke, I discovered a solution at an airport store and a controlling metaphor for my review: I examined Epstein, my nose bumping the page, with the aid of a tiny magnifying glass that I used like a monocle.
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