Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work and Death

The male genitals are worn externally as evolution is in the process of expelling them from the body. Another million years and they’ll be stored in a drawer.

The award-winning Scottish poet Don Paterson has assembled a comic, intelligent, and cranky collection of brief truths and conjectures and, in the process, revitalizes the classic pith of the aphorism. “The form’s only virtue is its brevity,” Paterson writes; “at least the reader cannot seriously hold that it has wasted their time.”