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Poetry in America offers extravagantly formed lyric and narrative poems that function like works of social realism for our times: hard times, wartime, divorce, times of downturn and dissipated resources. Where, in such times, can poetry emerge, the book asks-and answers-again and again. Largely set in rural places and small towns, these poems are politically committed but deeply sensuous, emotionally complex and compassionate. They take up the everyday in meaningful ways, and deliver it with blunt force, yet not without hope or bright humor. Intro -- Contents -- Part I. -- Double the Digits -- Landscape with Desire -- Bat Boy, Break a Leg -- Wild -- On an Oregon Mountain I Remember the Hebrew Mystics -- Garlic -- English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing -- '78 Chevy -- Gravity Hill -- Letter to Dad from New Danville, PA -- Nights Like This -- Gettysburg, 1996 -- Winter Riff -- Sometimes It's Easy to Know What I Want -- Poetry in America -- Part II. -- The Baby Screaming in the Backseat -- After Birth, a Conversation with Myself -- Mother with Toddler in Wartime -- The Materiality of Language at Lincoln -- This Side of Paradise -- Swallows over Bellefonte -- Veterans Day, Greene County, PA, 2004 -- The Day -- Francis, the Wolf, a War, and Terror -- Cardio-kickboxing in a Town of 6,000 -- Gerard Manley Hopkins on the 6 Train -- September's End -- Years from Now When You Are Weary -- Part III. -- Hen -- Westmoreland -- Tissue Balloon -- Mrs. Bailey Turns Up for a Poetry Reading at Hemingway's Café in Pittsburgh -- Across from Jay's Book Stall in Pittsburgh -- Memorial Day, 1972 -- Feast of the Epiphany -- Elegy Against --, Ten Years Later -- The Girl in the Backseat Returns to Pittsburgh -- The Beauty Line -- Return to Bern -- Oral Tradition -- Rachel on the Threshing Floor -- 1. Photograph -- 2. Diary -- 3. All Things Work Together for Good for Them that Love the Lord -- 4. Floating on the Lobsang -- Summer of the 17-Year Cicada -- Yehuda Amichai in Late November -- Hens and Chicks -- Notes -- Acknowledgments.
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