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Benger is like the Ernie Pyle of the bar flies. Not a barfly himself (Ernie wasn't a real soldier), just a fly, on a wall, with a pen, recording the saga--more like soggha--of the lives of the patrons of a rundown bar, a place with "knifed-up" booths and spiderwebbed windows. The kind of place where no one asks the guy sitting alone in a dark corner how his day has been. A home-y dump, or dive, where life happens mostly by default and in between drinks--raison d'etre for the joint's existence.It is sordid, but it is life. A kind of life anyway: lived with lowered expectations and far from the movers and shakers of the world.Like a good reporter, Benger rarely intrudes his self, his "I" into the stories he tells. Stories like little vignettes from a Twi-Lit Zone of those "stuck" in an endless loop of "just one more.""SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY" this ain't, but is similarly structured in that Benger also turns his gaze--as did Masters-- onto his characters, one gin-mill habitue after another, revealing, in portraits, truth about each, through a plain-spoken poetry--without frills, porcelain, doo-dads, or mention of any Greek gods--and in the manner of another mid-Western writer, Sherwood Anderson, whose stories of the townsfolk of WINESBERG, OHIO, were bathed in the similar sadness and poignancy of Benger's Tales of Intoxication.This is a little gem of a collection. I leave you with some words from my favorite of the book, "Potential": "Under the awning, cigarettes glowing,/the patrons convene with only the/percussive music of the midnight rain...Boozy scents swept free by the autumn breeze...Streetlamps flicker with no promise of dawn,/yawns hidden behind callused , overworked palms...Outside reminds us of what life could be."