A previously unpublished selection, Joanna Ruocco's The Boghole and the Beldame is a pastoral hallucination--more spell than story--that harks back to the waking/walking life of an archetypal dreamer. Afoot in the muck of language, Ruocco paints a thicket in which every shimmering growth baffles the landscape. The characters--creatures, figures, names--in The Boghole and the Beldame lean against time, pluck it for quills, wring its veins for blue,...