Book excerpt: Peanut Butter & Jellyfish is a collection of diverse, often incongruous stories and poems. The theme of Florida surfaces and then vanishes as readers find themselves transported to places like Winchester, VA, Taylorsville, NC, St. Louis, MO, Green Village, NJ, Paw Paw, WV, the Mexican coast, and the Syria-Iraq border. The tone ranges from wistful to hilarious, from solemn to silly, from grim to outrageous and back. Humor predominates, at times uproarious, at others wry. Nostalgia comes in a close second with evocations of the past that are moving, often startling in their realism, and now and then, unexpectedly dark.