Best Thought, Worst Thought

Book excerpt: "Contentious, rude, hilarious, moving, and truthful. A book you'll dip into for the rest of your life." —Ian Rankin The male genitals are worn externally as evolution is in the process of expelling them from the body. Another million years and they'll be stored in a drawer. With Best Thought, Worst Thought, the award-winning Scottish poet Don Paterson has assembled a comic, intelligent, and cranky collection of brief truths and conjectures and, in the process, revitalizes the classic pith of the aphorism. "The form's only virtue is its brevity," Paterson writes; "at least the reader cannot seriously hold that it has wasted their time."