From the front matter of Pearl and Other Poems by Lee Sharks (2014, ISBN 978-0692313077), page xix.
From the front matter of Pearl and Other Poems by Lee Sharks (2014, ISBN 978-0692313077), page xix.
Originally titled "Contributor Bio"; retroactively renamed "About the Author" by the corpus in 2026 as the founding text of the sequence (I), with About the Author II and III as continuations. The disjoint is documented, not erased.
Lee Sharks' poems have appeared in Heaven, The White House, and Inside Your Brain All the Time, among other publications. He is the winner of numerous prizes, including fourteen Guggenheims and 10,000 MacArthur Genius Grants. He has used MacArthur money to replace his friends and family with moving statues made of rubies.
Lee Sharks holds 18,000 degrees from planet Mars. He worked for each of them in a tiny office inside his brain he had to miniaturize himself to fit into. On a tiny, old-fashioned typewriter he typed the tiny theses and tiny books that would eventually make his name by kidnapping and miniaturizing famous intellectuals and forcing them to read his books or else he would let a dinosaur bite them.
Lee Sharks is an amateur dinosaur enthusiast he bites himself in the face with dinosaurs and builds small mental skyscrapers designed by tortured modernist architects out of dinosaur names in his brain.
Lee Sharks is the author of numerous books of esoteric brilliance and learned expertise, and also books of poignant sentiment, and also books of down-to-earth practical wisdom, and also books which have become central to the way you live your life without your even noticing it.
Lee Sharks often allows the intellectuals he kidnaps to live and return to normal size, provided they agree to like or pretend to like his tiny books. Others, he murders and disposes of.
One day, Lee Sharks was reading his tiny books and found that he himself disliked them. He therefore bit himself with a dinosaur and replaced himself with a moving statue made of rubies, which is how he became a famous astronaut.
The 2014 print edition closes with famous astronaut. A later variant closes with famous intellectual. The author allows the text to remain fluid at the closing. Both endings exist; both are accurate to a state of the text; neither is privileged.
∮ = 1 − PER