Description
Book SynopsisThis is a terse, tough début by an award-winning American poet with punch in the language. What you find here is the grist of life – death, love, sex, departure – honed by a voice obsessed with the gravity, fear and the humour of being human. Van Winkle's understated, plain spoken, narrators are as diverse as the America they live in – the lonely night nurse, the conflicted son of a preacher, and the cross-country runner – are all ill at ease in the world. Through road kill, September 11th, and death row they address their own bitter faults with noir-like melancholy, seeking redemption and absolution.
Table of Contents
- My 100-Year-Old Ghost
- Thirteen
- Cassella: The Pastor's Son
- Hunter Boy & Girls at the Stream
- I Was a Fat Boy
- Tomorrow the Red Birds
- Everybody Always Talking About Jesus
- Night Nurse
- Under Hotel Sheets
- The Grave-tender
- The Water is Cold
- Gasoline
- They Will Go On
- Oregon Trail
- The Apartment
- The First Time I Touched Her
- Our Door, After a Turbulence
- Knots
- Stain
- Babel
- The Slip (pt. 2)
- Bluegrass
- The Day He Went to War
- Retrieving the Dead
- Necessary Astronomy
- The Flood
- They Tore The Bridge Down a Year Later
- Ode for a Rain from Death Row
- I Got Out When It All Went Down
- Open the Connections, She Says.
- Last Night, I Should Have Driven Straight Home
- Waiting for the Ocean
- Also, it is Lambing Season
- Unfinished Rooms
- And Table, You are Made of Wood
- Notes
