Winner of the 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Selected by Alicia Ostriker
These are tough-minded poems about loss, and what comes afterwards--the difficult work of rebuilding a life. Greg Rappleye gathers his material across a vast American landscape, from the Florida Keys through the Nevada Desert to the California Coast, rocketing around the country with some strange friends--Odysseus, William Faulkner, Frank Sinatra, and private eye Jim Rockford. Rappleye is not afraid to implicate the self, building a heroic persona in the classic sense--a person in whom the flaws are as celebrated as the occasional triumph.