Middle of the night and your head teems with half-formed thoughts: Did I pay the car insurance? Where did I park the car? Is my best dress shirt at the dry cleaners? What time’s the wedding on Saturday? Need a map of Vermont to get there. I should frame my vintage maps one of these days. Maybe start with that bird’s-eye view of New Amsterdam, or the blue-tinted mariner’s chart . . .

How stop this ceaseless ticker tape? The mind’s associative reflex is as rapid as it is circuitous, myriad things and things-to-do always unspooling in the brainpan. If you get out of bed, though, and grab a pen,

It comes as a surprise that Joshua Clover, a poet who teaches critical theory at UC Davis, begins his new book about pop music with a sympathetic meditation on political philosopher Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, Fukuyama responded to the death rattles of Soviet Communism with the now-legendary essay “The End of History?” His question mark was disingenuous; Fukuyama was sure of it. Taking an intellectual victory lap on behalf of the emerging world order, he wrote, “We have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.”

Drawing on the tradition of fanciful collage practiced by such poets as John Ashbery, David Shapiro, and Joe Brainard, Brandon Downing wields his own scissors to cut a distinctive patch within this New York School specialty. Other influences—Charles Henri Ford and Tom Phillips—may also be in evidence, but Downing’s assuredly contemporary sensibility marks both his choice of images and his orchestration of texts. Familiar visuals like those lifted from ’50s- and ’60s-era postcards, magazine ads, and grade school textbooks mix provocatively with rarer fare—a World War II plane-spotting guide, a

Do people who tote around thousands of sonically flattened, Pro Tooled songs in their iPods know that most of what they’re hearing is closer to a computer program than it is to music? Nowadays, pop music is mainly fast food to be gobbled on the go, to be heard through earbuds or on portable docks with plug-in speakers. As long as it sounds good enough, nobody seems to mind.

But Greg Milner does. A contributing editor for Spin and the co-author (with Joe Berlinger) of Metallica: This Monster Lives, Milner has explored a century-plus of efforts to capture something as ephemeral as a voice or

The premise of Under the Dome is very simple: an invisible and impenetrable barrier of unknown provenance envelops the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, instantly transforming this latter-day Grover’s Corners into a snow globe. The dome is in place by page three, and thereafter things start going to hell. About 980 pages later, they get there. Under the Dome is sprawling, messy, bizarre, infuriating, intermittently wonderful, and above all else, addictive. It’s Our Town meets No Exit, on a scale that makes Bleak House look like Of Mice and Men; a deeply flawed pop gem that’s hard to classify

Near the middle of the Inferno, the poet Brunetto Latini tells Dante, “If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.” The scene is doubly poignant. The first prick comes with Brunetto’s encouragement of his former student, a gesture of generosity that Dante answers with a gratitude that “will be found, as long as I live, in my language.” The second and more lasting poignancy arrives when we remember that Brunetto is speaking from a script of Dante’s devising. The teacher says what he says because those are the words his student wanted to hear.

In the introduction to her