Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Part Charlie Chaplin, part Rimbaud, visionary poet Rob Cook recreates childhood and young adulthood in one of the funniest yet emotionally potent collections to appear. DIARY OF TADPOLE THE DIRTBAG is biography compressed into a series of darkly humorous vignettes—bristling, self- deprecating, yet celebratory. A long- haired Tadpole at last emerges from the miasma of his boyhood in an ill- fitting green trench coat. His saving graces are his acute vision (although his eyesight is bad along with a host of other maladies)and his humor, gloriously his own. Although he fails, he wants to become the Einstein of Failure.