Book excerpt: Think the pinched aren’t polysyllabic?" You've never heard from Mexico in this register. Nor moved through the East Village and Jerusalem, Syria and Lebanon, with a guide who spies "what grows in broken concrete." Ben-Oni takes us along borderlands and scenes we rarely hear of in the news - to the very fringes of places like Sal Si Puedes (“Leave if you can”) with its sandals, jellyfish, beer bottles and narcotic wires, then into the marketplaces of melons and catcalls, with the tongue of a Gypsy "incapable of candor." This is exploration and revelation via the road less traveled... Where she finally lands pales beside how she sees the world through her tongue. The journey is all. And if you find yourself "unborn again... twitching in sin" or 'tasting toadstools' and singing the 'discordant dark', then you too may revel in that forbidden space of SOLECISM, reaping poetry from "what remains of the unruly wilds. – Amy King, Author of I Want to Make You Safe and I'm the Man Who Loves You