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Bookbuying in the Tenderloin (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

The Poem

Having originally published “Bookbuying in the Tenderloin” in The Hudson Review, Robert Hass included it in his first collection, Field Guide. A thirty-four-line poem employing a complex rhyme scheme punctuated by a scattered series of couplets, “Bookbuying in the Tenderloin” is vintage Hass: blunt, direct, and vivid in language and imagery but also profound in its larger social and philosophical implications. The title is straightforward enough; Hass’s poem does indeed describe a book-buying junket in the seedy Tenderloin district of San...

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