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.