The characters in Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s latest novel spend their time in the shadow of two mountains. One looms above their Coachella Valley trailer parks, motor courts and low-slung, bougainvillea-covered houses, a natural desert spectacle that gives them all pause at different times during the novel’s twists and turns. The other is the emergence of AIDS--the novel is set in the early 1980s--which starts as a little hill in the book’s beginning and grows to scary, towering heights as the community starts to lose some of its most beloved citizens to the scourge.

   Yolanda Ramírez, the book’s central character, sips a beer and watches the first mountain as she begins to recognize the specter of the second. A phlebotomist who delights in local epidemiological puzzles, she’s the first to wonder if the unnamed plague claiming Coachella’s residents isn’t connected to transfusions of tainted blood they got during that last liposuction. Yo’s gardener father Crescensio, hopelessly in love with the doomed Eliana, slowly and deliberately plants flowers outside her window for her to watch while she wastes away. Meanwhile an angry white man from Iowa is on his way across country to reclaim Yo’s new lover Marina and their daughter. A lot happens to the Coachella characters. They all take it gracefully, sipping Coronas and watering the plants, plotting and trying to hold it all together. Taylor, of Florida State’s English department, has written a warm, light and inviting novel. It’s one of those books that would make a great movie, except that Hollywood would ruin it with a maudlin script and too many tear-filled, star-studded moments backed by a sappy score. Catch Coachella now while it’s a fresh and thoroughly enjoyable book.

   Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson’s 1,000-plus-page collection of plays was published in 1616, the same year the Bard departed for the great beyond. To hear some in the literary community talk, you’d think the similarities between the two seminal English scribes stops dead there. While Shakespeare’s plays illuminated so much of human relationships, exploring life as it occurred between characters, Jonson is thought to have been more concerned with the individual.

   Jonson’s known for a more base type of writing. In his plays and poems, he examined life and language as it circulated through his characters. He also wrote a fair bit about food circulating through his characters. He spent lots of time discussing lots of bodily functions. So while Shakespeare’s characters are given to soliloquies on good and evil, the nature of honor and true love, you find Jonson’s going on about eating, drinking, digesting and excreting, often in terms that are pretty graphic even for 1616.

   Critics setting out to examine this esteemed writer’s preoccupation with the alimentary canal have come up with all sorts of explanations, the most notable of which have used narrow interpretations of Freudian theory to call Jonson an anal neurotic. But Bruce Boehrer, of Florida State's English department, takes care to trace the scatological Jonson back to his humble beginnings in 16th-century London--frankly a disgusting place to be. An aromatic network of ditches carrying raw human waste to the river served as London's municpal sewerage system. The main branch of this river of filth, the Fleet Ditch, ran right behind the Jonson house. Jonson’s stepfather planted a kitchen garden that backed right up to it, and the irony of recycling was never lost on the young Ben, who carried this image throughout his life and work.

   A colorful example begins the book’s introduction: Describing his ideal supper in Epigrams, Jonson notes that his guests will not have to endure bad poetry--unless they eat the pastry. It seems that 16th-century printers often used their own urine to soften up the ink rollers during printing. And Jonson jokes that his poems line the town's pastry pans.

   In its astute examinations of overeating, alimentary activity and ordure and their effect on Jonson’s work, Boehrer blazes new trails in critical theory as he portrays a writer so obsessed with food and its travels through the body that his work is both literature and a culinary presentation, its author both poet and chef.