I finally got around to reading Madeleine is Sleeping, by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. Wow. Wow! What an amazing melding of dreams and waking, the sensual and the absurd (which are often one and the same.) Each short chapter--ranging from a single sentence to two pages long--is a perfect prose poem, filled with gorgeous, haunting language and imagery. Copyright issues be damned, I have to share this chapter, which contains both birds and fruit, and thus forever won my heart:

fruit

Papa grows impatient with the fruit that litters his orchard. The air assumes the rich rot of a winery; he complains that breathing alone will make him drunk. In the evening the children wander home, bloated and sticky, but still they cannot eat the pears as quickly as they fall. The local birds, too, are so fat with apple that they can barely reach their roosts as night, and when darkness falls, the orchard floor bubbles as the sated birds make listless, halfhearted efforts at flight.