I am a first generation immigrant from the Washington DC area. My father, an economist, received a scholarship and borrowed money to get pursue doctorate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He remained a foreigner who never quite adapted to America, and I am the son of a stranger: burdened and bedeviled by the tenuousness of national identity. My reviews, poetry, fiction, and literary criticism seek the foundations in contemporary art and experience. At the same time, they find me steering clear the false certainties that would model knowledge and experience. To date, I've published two works of literary commentary: one explains the changes in the way Americans wrote poetry around the middle of the last century; the other locates today's satiric fiction as a coherent movement with its roots in an ancient tradition.