A rabbit cosmogony, a libretto to be sung, spoken, and projected, a radio-play-folk-opera-duck-animation-with-dances, ASTRS is set in the 53rd State of the Union, zone of the sixth chrysanthemum, where Augustus B. Rabbit and Sibyl Kempson meet in a place where the end times can't seem to wrap it up and the middle times hang around eternally. A pre-middle play by 53rd State's founding editor offers a roadmap to the 53rd State and to the troubled state of the present fifty. It should come as no surprise: "in the cosmos," as Keithley writes, "associations ring across disances. In the 53rd state they meet in the corner."