A very enjoyable collection of "bite-sized" poems that is a good "pick up once in a while" book. I was first exposed to archy and mehitabel in high school but I found that the poems have much more resonance with the passing of years. The poems are written by "archy", a free verse poet in a past life who has been reincarnated as a philosophical cockroach. He writes by diving headfirst onto a typerwiter -- rendering capital letters and punctuation moot. He observes life around him, and also tells tales of his friend mehitabel, a cat who claims to have been Cleopatra. archy's unique writing style will require your complete concentration and the occasional reread; but this is part of the fun as you come to appreciate his wry view of the world. This is offset by the somewhat tragic figure of mehitabel, who strives to be "always gay" despite her fall from the days of Cleopatra.

"you ask me where I have been but you had better ask me where I am and what I have been drinking exclamation point"

"mehitabel has no morals but I like her disposition."

my nan recommended this book to me. i thought it was funny.

Toujours gai, kid, toujours gai.

A fun and unusual little anthology that offers insight into the days when newspapers were less utilitarian in construct.

"Archy and Mehitabel" is the creation of Don Marquis, a columnist for the New York Tribune, who writes from the perspective of Archy, a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach. At nights, Archy crawls onto a typewriter and slowly crafts his poetry by slamming his body onto the keys, one letter at a time. He laments his sullen existence, comments on the daily minutiae of the humans towering above him, and recounts his conversations with Mehitabel, a street cat who claims to be Cleopatra in a past life.

The mythos is wholly unique, and Marquis commits to his canon, never once letting on that his column could be anything but the musings of a verbose roach, and you can tell he loves the small cast of characters he has created. And to think that pieces like this were the product of a newspaper is hard to grasp in our current time, where newspapers increasingly struggle to find relevance in our technological landscape. I'd love to see a paper take some artistic risks like this today.

The poems themselves can be hit-or-miss. The longer pieces, often involving rants from the "toujours gai" Mehitabel, are tedious and repetitive. It's the shorter works that are truly golden, the pieces that focus on archy's oddly-prescient social criticisms. "Aesop Revised by Archy" is worth the price of admission alone (Google it, if you have the chance).

Pick this up for a brief look into a century-old America facing eerily similar concerns to our own, and a columnist's earnest efforts at understanding it through his humble world-building.

Don Marquis was eerily ahead of his time.

I imagine Archy would have loved Twitter.