THE PUSHCART PRIZE, XXVII

The Pushcart, that great democratic literary experiment, continues, in its ample girth, to rumble forward filled with gems, blunders, bafflements, and gifts.

Sixty-six poems, essays, memoirs, fictions, and nonfictions make up this 27th collection of pieces from the thronging world of small presses, and there are plenty of new names to get acquainted with. One of these is Katherine Taylor, with her darkly comic memoir “Traveling with Mother”: “After the mutt dog died of cancer, I suggested we bury it in the pet cemetery outside. Daddy said, ‘What cemetery?’ I said, ‘Where you buried Buttons after you smashed her.’ He said, ‘Katherine, I scraped that dog off the driveway and threw it in the garbage.’ I said, ‘That’s against sanitation laws.’ ” There’s also Dan Chaon’s story of scorn and stupidity cunningly delivered (“I Demand to Know Where You’re Taking Me”), while the hot stiletto is poked into readers by Aimee Bender, in “Jinx.” Aleksandr Kushner provides a sidelong portrait of Vermeer (“This is what is called the absence of biography”) in “The Master of Delft,” and disquieted natural scientist Jeffrey A. Lockwood (“To Be Honest”) writes about how he “began to study grasshoppers in 1986, learning how they spent their days,” the better to kill them. If Louise Gluck’s poem “The Sensual World” cuts you down a peg, then Robert Pinsky’s “Book” will lift you with its offertory music. The shag and floss of D.A. Powell’s “[My Lot To Spin the Purple: That the Tabernacle Should Be Made]” invites rereading after rereading. One of the best selections is John Hales’s “Line,” a memoir of his summer working for the Cadastral Survey in laying down a line straight and true, an experience that leaves him with “chronic ideological confusion, occasional disorientation, and an unaccountable and unseemly pride.”

The Pushcart shows itself again a stream to pan for gold in.