Summary:

A series of approximately 175 short fictional monologues or "postcards," each less than a page, in the voice of an alcoholic--the view from "the bottle"--describing the obsession, rationalization, pain, dissolution, and toll that alcoholism takes on career, body, friends and family. Each "postcard" is written in a different voice: sometimes old, sometimes young; male or female; reformed or not. In few words, they capture intense moments that vividly evoke the misery and folly in the rest of alcoholic existence. There is humour and despair.

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Summary:

In this dramatic monologue, the speaker is traveling in a warring country, and wakes up shivering and vomiting in a "strange hotel room, in a poor country where my language isn't spoken." As to the cause of this illness, he points out that an execution is occurring on this day at this hour. He lives through the execution as if it were his own ("And so now they come--they come for the man who lies on his cot").

He sees the "breaking of the skin" and his "body shifting upwards, slightly in the air" as the electricity is activated (4). He knows that it is the Marxists who are "being tortured and killed" (16). Throughout the monologue, the speaker attempts to make sense of his privilege in the face of poverty, violence, and injustice.

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