Tell Me Why
(BlazeVOX, forthcoming, May 2025):

On March 31, 1964, The Beatles performed “Tell Me Why” before a paid audience (one that included the young Phil Collins) for inclusion in the film and album versions of A Hard Day’s Night. Just months later, Arkady Leokum published the first of his encyclopedic children’s books in the Tell Me Why series. Not really even a correspondence, let alone causation; there had already been two previous songs with that title, and a 1958 effort by Leokum with Scholastic Book Services. But Arkady was clearly riding a wave, one that he continued to ride through many other books in the series, culminating with The Big Book of Tell Me Why. Poet David Starkey was among the millions of readers, and as his quintets play across the pages of this wonderful book, the connections just keep multiplying. Leonardo, for example, appears in the first section sketching mushrooms, reappears to help answer “Why Are Some People Left-Handed,” then comes around again sketching helicopters and inventing cartoons. It’s a heady mixture that, like Neruda’s Bestiario raises as many questions as it answers. There will always be more “tell me whys,” as any parent or sibling will tell you, because each explanation always opens yet more inquisitors’ pathways. “We can’t see what it is we crave,” writes Starkey, and hence the endless quest for answers. Also like Neruda’s Bestiario, Starkey’s Tell Me Why arrives with a series of mysterious illustrations contributed by the artist Dall*E. Open AI insists that Dall*E can create art from descriptions in natural language. But has Open AI ever before scraped such language as “A window, a ladder. // A kind of polestar for the mariner / wandering from Non-Being into Being”?
—A.L. Nielsen
Author of Meme Wars