This 2003 offering from crusty Texan B. H. Fairchild goes straight to the top shelf of contemporary American verse. Fairchild's voice effortlessly combines the lyrical with the gritty, marrying a Westerner's laconic fatalism to the inchoate yearnings of the true romantic. Lonesome plains, deserted roads, tall tales, cars, jazz, baseball, liquor, sex…Early Occult is a fever dream of a lost America, the one that fell between the armrests of a beer-stained movie theater in Topeka, Kansas circa 1953, just before the fall. ( )