In "The Philosopher Savant Crosses the River," Rustin Larson now winds his words several notches closer to a phantom sense of the certainties we once thought we could assume -- the way life promised a few solid things, perhaps "the purpose of life," which now seems sold door to door as "an abrupt change," if anything. Words in their ordinary sense have been released from those customary connections, and often seem spoken from a place of floating far below meaning's surface, as if a sedimentia abounding in the reasoning of tea leaves or some other structure of correspondence beyond our normal grasp were sending messages to the surface of the page.-- Audrey Bohanan