Book: archy and mehitabel

Overview
"archy and mehitabel" is a collection of free-verse sketches and satirical fables centered on two unforgettable voices: archy, a philosophizing cockroach who claims to be the reincarnation of a vers libre poet, and mehitabel, an alley cat of indomitable spirit who insists she was Cleopatra in a former life. Their adventures, confessions, and quarrels unfold in brisk, unrhymed lines that mingle streetwise wit with rueful tenderness, creating a bustling portrait of urban American life as seen from the low vantage of the floorboards and the alley.

Premise and Narrative Device
The book’s conceit is that archy sneaks into a newspaper office at night and hurls his small body onto the typewriter keys, one letter at a time. Lacking the strength to depress the shift key, he produces lines without capitals and almost no punctuation, a constraint that becomes a signature aesthetic. The daytime columnist, addressed as "boss", serves as a framing presence who discovers these nocturnal compositions on his desk and passes them along to readers. Through this device, the city becomes a stage where humans appear as distant giants while the true moral commentators scuttle and prowl at the margins.

Characters
Archy is earnest, sardonic, and oddly courtly, forever testing high ideas against the bric-a-brac of daily survival. He is an observer of hypocrisies, political, religious, and artistic, and a romantic who keeps his idealism even while dodging brooms. Mehitabel is his foil and sometime muse: swaggering, sensual, battered, and resilient. She sings a battered chanson of freedom, punctuating setbacks with "wotthehell" and "toujours gai", yet her songs carry bruises, wayward toms, litters lost or dispersed, the cold calculus of alley life. Around them cluster a chorus of minor creatures, rats, moths, fleas, parakeets, each popping in to lampoon a human institution or to deliver a shard of worldly wisdom wrapped in slapstick.

Themes and Tone
Beneath the wisecracks lies a steady meditation on survival, dignity, and the moral comedy of modernity. Archy’s lowly station lets him puncture pretension without bitterness; he can praise courage in a stray or a clerk, and skewer cant whether it comes from boosterish journalism, pious reformers, or self-satisfied artists. Mehitabel embodies the cost of freedom, a temperament that refuses shame even when circumstances humble her. Their friendship, cross-grained and affectionate, anchors the book’s seesaw between melancholy and merriment. The city itself becomes a living organism, its vents, dumpsters, and lamplight corners a geography of chance where birth, hunger, luck, and loyalty contend.

Style and Form
The stripped-down typographic voice, lowercase, breathless enjambments, conversational turns, gives the poems their snap and intimacy. The free verse feels both tossed-off and exact, a street monologue that can pivot from knockabout gag to epigram in a beat. Animal fable is the chosen lens, but the moral is seldom neat; archy trusts readers to hear the shrug inside a joke and the ache tucked inside the shrug. The lack of punctuation becomes a rhythm rather than a limitation, a way of letting thought unspool as if it were being typed in real time by a small, stubborn body insisting on being heard.

Legacy
What endures is the blend of satire and compassion. "archy and mehitabel" preserves a voice that respects the intelligence of the reader and the battered grace of the common creature. It is a book about talking animals that reveals how humans live, and about a hard world made bearable by quick wit, stray mercies, and the stubborn pleasure of saying one’s piece before the office lights come on.