Quite Busy: Auto­di­dac­tic Man­ager Kelsey Armway. Westch­ester Univ. (OKAY, dist.), $37.75 (183p) ISBN 000-0-0000-0000-2

“Who do I really think I am? Not myself in movies but myself?” asks B. in his third col­lec­tion, a Cap­tiva Island-​based song of the swim­ming pool that whole­somely mas­tur­bates the rela­tion­ship between geog­ra­phy and iden­tity. B, who is also a taxi­der­mist, mer­rily his­tori­cizes his life-​experience in the con­text Donald Fagen’s solo records: “I have lived through three albums these twenty-​six years”— and his ego takes on a most unseemly shape, con­stantly express­ing a desire to uncover the mean­ing of a city life he never knew and, so instead, the non-​smoking sec­tion of his pan­cake restau­rant in Sani­bel  (“Inside every grid­dle another grid­dle exists. Under every flap­jack another flap­jack”). B. recounts his entre­pre­neur­ial tri­umphs in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order, in lists of cal­cu­la­tors bought and knives sold, and the book’s 72 sec­tions are each named after a town he plans to open a hot cake house in.  His meth­ods impose a flac­cid nar­ra­tive rubber band around the entire text, and tend to jumble the reader’s already spu­ri­ous sense of time. B. exploits the cat­a­clysmic events of his youth to nau­se­at­ing effect; he writes of his time spent as a paper­boy in Gulf Breeze: “I was in exile, wear­ing badly torn under­pants in a totally empty apart­ment with my homi­ci­dal brother in law.” This is an entirely fatu­ous work, every crevice seep­ing with dull med­i­ta­tions on batter mix­tures, humid­ity and what it feels like to be a suc­cess in the U.S.A. (Jan.)