Contents
Introduction
Marge Piercy | What's That Smell in the Kitchen?
The Northwest
Kim Addonizio | The Philosopher's Club
James Broughton | Aglow in Nowhere
Tom Crawford | Nestucca River Poem
Skinnydipping on the Molalla River
Sharon Doubiago Signal Hill
When the Airplane Stopped
Mother Said
Lawrence Ferlinghetti | from The Old Italians Dying
Legend with Sea Breeze
Black Money
Robert Gluck | The Chronicle
Jim Gove | Meditating at Olema
We Fish Our Lives Out
Norma at the A&W Drive-In
Name as the Shadow of the Predator's Wing
Adhesive: For Earlene
Carolyn Kizer | Promising Author
Dorianne Laux | Ghosts
Colleen J. McElroy | With Bill Pickett at the 101 Ranch
Janice Mirikitani | Jade
Ralph Pomeroy | River's End
Progress
Carlos Reyes | Moon Mullins
Vern Rutsala | Northwest Passage
William Stafford | Roll Call
William Talcott | Boogie Board
Joanne Townsend | Something That Has to Do With...
David Wagoner | My Father's Football Game
Al Young | California Peninsula: El Camino Real
The Midwest
Antler | The Discovery of Lake Michigan
i. Summerfield
ii. Red Oak
Visiting My Father in Florida
Volare
Philip Dacey | The Feet Man
Jim Daniels | Watching My Old House Burn on the News
Patricia Dobler | Field Trip to the Rolling Mill, 1950
Gary Gildner | The Porch
Laurence Goldstein | Ann Arbor Solitary
Jim Gustafson | The Idea of Detroit
Christopher Howell | Mean and Stupid
Lorri Jackson | July in Chicago
William Kloefkorn | I Had Been Chainedand Padlocked
Ted Kooser | Yevtushenko
Greg Kuzma | Police
Brad Leithauser | A Michigan Ghosttown
Edge of America
A Bottomlands Farmer Suffers a Sea Change
Todd Moore | after work
Howard Nemerov | Landscape with Self-Portrait
I. Prisoners at Fort Marion: 1875-1878
III. Howling Wolf (1850-1927) Cheyenne
Kurt Nimmo All the Women in Suburbia
Pommes de Terre
At Anfinson's in Hettinger, North Dakota
Richard Pflum | Putting It Somewhere
Frank Polite | In My Black Book
The Change to One-Way after Repaving
Vandal
Len Roberts | Ten Below
Herbert Scott | Morning, Milking
Lucien Stryk | Luck-1932
William Trowbridge | Late Fall Night
Mona Van Duyn | In the Missouri Ozarks
Mark Vinz | Roadside Attraction
Diane Wakoski | The Ring of Irony
David Wojahn | Heaven for Railroad Men
Elizabeth Wood | Christmas Mass
New York City
Jack Anderson | from Field Trips on the Rapid Transit
John Ceely | Heart Beats the Rent Collector
Amy Clampitt | The Subway Singer
Ira Cohen | Tip the Light Fantastic
Cornelius Eady | Atomic Prayer
Edward Field The Last Bohemians
Allen Ginsberg | Velocity of Money
Arthur Gregor | Gentle Lamb
Marilyn Hacker | Runaways Cafe I
Rudy Kikel | Mother (from Autographs, 1955)
Donald Lev | The Human Condition in Brighton Beach
Stanley Moss | Potato Song
Sharon Olds | Summer Solstice, New York City
Molly Peacock | Subway Vespers
Solitary in Brooklyn
Lynne Savitt | I'm Glad You Are Casually Interested in Why I Was an Hour Late/or Take Your Fucking Hands Off My Throat
James Schuyler | This Dark Apartment
Barbara Soretsky | Only Child
David Trinidad | Driving Back from New Haven
The Northeast
A Poem for Nelson Mandela
Amiri Baraka | from A Poem of Destiny
West Indian Primer
Alan Catlin | Pushing Forty
Billy Collins | Lowell, Mass.
John DeWitt | Old Post Grill
At the Smithville Methodist Church
Walking the Marshland
Martin Espada | Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction
Harry Humes | My Mother at Evening
Manuel Igrejas | Herois do Mar
On the Proposed Seizure of Twelve Graves in a Colonial Cemetery
At the Last Rites for Two Hotrodders
Galway Kinnell | from The Auction
The Long Approach
Encounter in August
Vacations
Love Canal: Two Poems
Leo Mailman | Mrs. Greta Freeport Baxter
Dan Masterson | Bloodline
Gerald McCarthy | Note in a Bottle
William Meredith | Rhode Island
Peter Morris | The White Sand
Alicia Ostriker | The Pure Products of America
Ron Padgett | Sonnet
Dan Sicoli | dennis
Reed Whittemore | The Destruction of Washington
Shad-Time
The Eisenhower Years
The Great Bird of Love
The South
Gerald Barrax | Spirituals, Gospels
John Bensko | The Wild Horses of Assateague Island
David Bergman | Urban Renewal, Baltimore
Sallie Bingham | Two Girls
Face Jugs: Homage to Lanier Meaders
The Window
Turner Cassity | Appalachia in Cincinnati
Fred Chappell | Abandoned Schoolhouse on Long Branch
Toi Derricotte | Blackbottom
James Dickey | Root-light, or the Lawyer's Daughter
Charles Fort | The Worker (We Own Two Houses)
George Garrett | Long & Short of It: A Letter to Brendan Galvin
Charles Ghigna | The Untold Truth about Hank
R. S. Gwynn | A Short History of the New South
Hunt Hawkins | Mourning the Dying American Female Names
Michael Heffernan | Living Room
Donald Justice | A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida
Catholic Boys
More Shrines
Martin Kirby | from Afterlife of a Troll
Yusef Komunyakaa | Landscape for the Disappeared
Paul Lawson | Wallis Warfield in Wakefield Manor Days
Susan Ludvigson | Love at Cooter's Carpet, Fort Lawn, S.C.
Kentucky Woman
Boarded Up
Peter Meinke | The Vietnamese Fisherman on Tampa Bay
Everywhere Pregnant Women Appear
Columbus of the Alphabet
Peter Schmitt | Glance
Dave Smith | The Tire Hangs in the Woods
Leon Stokesbury | Lauds
Dabney Stuart | from The Opposite Field
Henry Taylor | Projectile Point, Circa 2500 B.C.
James Whitehead | His Slightly Longer Story Song
Wiedersehen
Thinking about Bill, Dead of AlDS
Charles Wright | Virginia Reel
The Old West
Mary Crow | Going Home
Steve Fisher | Weather Nose
Sex Education
The Weight of the Sheets
Blood Trail
Anselm Hollo | In the Land of Art
Walter McDonald | The Night of Rattlesnake Chili
The Saddest Cowboy in Texas
Blood
Simon Ortiz | Canyon de Chelly
Greg Pape | Storm Pattern
Incident at Imuris
Singing the Internationale
drawing to an inside straight
driving to Vegas
Reg Saner | Where I Come From
Gary Short | Near the Bravo 20 Bombing Range
Gary Soto | Mexicans BeginJogging
Maura Stanton | Returning to Arizona
El Paso Sex
H2O
Mark Weber | Hite Marina, Lake Powell
Charlotte M. Wright | Polygamist
Southern California
Christopher Buckley White
Charles Bukowski | from Horsemeat
Prisoner of Los Angeles (2)
The California Crack
the extras
no admittance
Keith A. Dodson | Poor Losers
Michael C. Ford | The Disappearance of Deanna Durbin
Elliot Fried | Campground
Lisa Glatt | Hungry
Donna Hilbert | Cerritos
Marael Johnson | Systems Alert
Marilyn Johnson | Our Mothers Were Sisters
Redondo
Blue
Dear Superman
Steve Kowit | Josephine's Garden
La Loca | from Adventures on the Isle of Adolescence
D. H. Lloyd | Bible Bob Responds to a Jesus Honker
california
a constituency of dunces
Nichola Manning | Three Cars
Lizbeth Parker | A Girl My Age
Robert Peters | Hollywood Boulevard Cemetery
Brent Reiten | Sex with Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor
Heartthrobs
Me and My Mother's Morphine
Timothy Steele | A Shore
To John Garfield, for Whom the Postman Only Rang Once
hit in the head
Mystic Craze
The Stud
Lingo
Charles Webb | Dr. Invisible and Mr. Hide
Jill Young | The Light That Made Him Whisper
Cowboys and Indians
Burrito
The Wreckers
Considering the Accordion
The Man Who Had Singing Fits
Howard Nemerov | Found Poem
Acknowledgments
Index