After the Bachelor rejected her -- even he said, "I think Christi had a 'Fatal Attraction' thing" -- she could barely keep her hysteria under control as she cried and said, "I was supposed to have another opportunity to show Aaron that I'm not an emotional basket case".
Those poems describe aversions and attractions, things discovered and overheard, friends met in adulthood and, on rare occasions, the poet's own youth, served up with a compression that approximates (but never becomes) self-mockery: "What a lot of erections, voidings, pretzels, / bouncing the ball against the stoop.
"I wanted to overcome the fear I was feeling, and it expressed my attraction towards things [of] beauté tragique (tragic beauty)." He became fascinated with viruses, which replicate but are not living things.
When women muse about other women, trying to guess at that intangible seductive quality that goes beyond mere appearance -- described by Steve Martin in his novel "Shopgirl" as "little invisible ions of attraction" -- things get more complicated.
However powerful the attraction, sometimes things just don't work out.
"I can't explain my attraction to things that are Latin," she said.
"I love going to a yard sale with somebody who has a slightly different eye, or a slightly different attraction to things than I do.
Joan Nelson, on the other hand, meditated on the nostalgic attraction of things old, like antique paintings, and she is still creating glossy, craftily simulated fragments of aged pictures.
And although the cultural attraction of things American, from movies to McDonald's, is immense, EU colleges and universities attract easily as many foreign students as America's do.
As a child in the Netherlands, Rebecca Gomperts often sailed with her family in the chilly waters of the North Sea, a pastime that left her with a seemingly fearless attraction to things nautical.
Margaret Thatcher's "favourite businessman", Sir John Broome, owner of Alton Towers, the Staffordshire theme park, promised to turn it into a similar visitor attraction, but things went pear-shaped and, having stripped the historic building of its roof, he sold it on to the Hong Kong property tycoon Victor Hwang.
