Neal Bowers is a poet. He’s also a professor of English at Iowa State. And he’s been plagiarized.

I loved Neal Bowers’ writing in Words for the Taking. He describes the feelings that pour into poetry, the not-quite-sure-what-it-means but it’s mine, the pieces of self that hide between the lines. He even gives an example of one of his poems, except the credited author is someone else. The first lines are changed. The line-breaks aren’t quite the same. But on the next page is Neal Bowers’ poem, and this isn’t just an accidental similarity. The words, almost a page of words, are almost all identical.

As a mathematician I wonder when I read online complaints about plagiarism. Sometimes it’s just a sentence, even a six-word sentence, that someone’s claiming has been plagiarized. I wonder if the author was taking a challenge – include these words in your story perhaps, or write what this sentence inspires. I try to imagine how the statistics would look, and how easy it would be to find some sentences that look alike.

As a writer I’m sometimes afraid to publish what I’ve written. What if I’ve accidentally plagiarized a thought, some distantly remembered reading resurfacing in my mind, masquerading as my own.

But a whole poem?

Neal Bowers’ poem was most certainly plagiarized, and he writes how it felt to imagine someone else laying claim to his thoughts, violating his memories, insinuating himself into his secret feelings. Women responded to the news with threats of violence; how they would break the kneecaps of the plagiarist if they found him. Men were more likely to say, well, no one got hurt, and you can always write another poem. I wonder why, as does the author.

Soon the author is following clues, finding more poems, more false identities, all tied to the same thief of words who, it seems, must have lived not so many miles from me. There’s the lawyer with dollar signs suddenly waking in his eyes, the private detective, doggedly persistent, refusing to be fobbed off. There’s boxes of papers, fake apologies, cheap tricks and cheap checks, until the story, still fact, not fiction, takes its darker turn, and I still can’t stop reading.

Words for the Taking is beautifully written, fascinating for a wannabe writer, a reader of poetry, a lover of mysteries, or just a student of human nature. I really enjoyed it. ( )

A creepy compelling story of a compulsive psychopath.
You may be wondering what's a psychopath got to do with plagiarism. Well, read this book and you'll find out. But I have to warn you: read it when you've got enough time to finish it, because you won't want to put it down once you start it. It seems odd that a book about writing and the "minor crime" of plagiarism could be as gripping as Words for the Taking turns out to be. Bowers makes it that kind of a book by his own careful reconstruction of the crime. I had just finished reading his collection of poems, Out of the South, when I picked this book up, so I was freshly familiar with the poems he spoke of - the ones "stolen" by the real-life villain, David Jones/Sumner. One would think a person who "stole words" would be a Wally Cox kinda harmless, bookish sort. Not so with Jones/Sumner. Jones/Sumner is a conniving, crafty criminal who spreads his nastiness from Oregon to Iowa, Japan and Germany and countless points everywhere else, as he steals words not just from Bowers, but from poets and writers nationwide. What Bowers uncovers about this man with the help of a good private investigator (and a rather useless lawyer) will literally make your skin crawl. It had the same effect on Bowers and his wife. What was perhaps even worse, however, was the way it robbed Neal Bowers of his ability to write poetry and also the way this seemingly innocuous theft of his poems insinuated itself into the very fabric of his life, of his memories of his father and family. I mean, this is literally one of the creepiest (there's that word again, the same one that Neal's wife uses) true-life tales I have read in years. Interestingly enough, this book was written more than a dozen years ago and was just reprinted. It STILL makes your skin crawl. If you love books and you like a good suspense/thriller, read this book. ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/174466.html#cutid3 ( )