In her wonderful little book Cuttings, Georgia Greeley gathered lines from ten local poets’ works, and combined them to make an entirely new poem. I attended her first public reading last year and was amazed by the fluidity of her repurposed text.

Today I’m presenting ten “cuttings” of my own, assembled from various sources over the past few weeks. Although I lack the skill or will to join them coherently, I suppose that’s just as well. These gems are all pretty intriguing on their own. To see them in their original context, click on the embedded links.

Cocktails on the pontoon boat are a lot more fun since the dog learned to drive.

It was Kormand’s first sighting of Steingard’s ankles that marked the beginning of a fascination that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Objects of wool, hair, etc., including shrunken heads, are liable to be attacked by moths and other destructive insects.

Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.

He explored these binary concepts to find fundamental truths about humanity, noting, for example, that some cannibal groups boiled their friends, but roasted their enemies.

If an unannounced product exists solely in the minds of speculative journalists and know-nothing analysts, can it be “delayed”?

During his life he excelled at mediocrity.

Apparently some shrubs had died and due to the leafless twigs, the risk of a child impaling themselves on the shrubs [was] substantial.

Security is a kind of death … and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills.

He repeatedly lost many of his antiquities, first to seizures by the Nazis and later in two divorces.