Paper Shoes Author:Pavel Srut Pavel Šrut’s fractured lyrics are often themselves fractured parables about the individual’s relation to authority, whether that authority be the state, a colonizing power, the court of public oppinion, a dubious beloved, or history itself. In some of his poems, the wives of Great Men have the last, often hilarious, word on their husbands’ accom... more »plishments, and in others a poor Everyman schmuck Novak--the Czech equivalent of Smith, though even more suggestive of ordinariness--bumps his head, again and again, on the iron question mark at the heart of existence.« less