The Next Place, Paperback

The poems in The Next Place inspect both the geographies of landscape and our own interior geographies. These poems find the borders where lives intersect, where the sight of a former lover evokes memories of -a bruised Volvo...skin that smelled like burned oil.- No matter who inhabits these poems, and a large cast moves through them--Chet Baker, King Lear, Isaac Newton, various friends of the poet, both living and dead--they inhabit a space where one world is always encroaching on the next. A boy contemplates holding up a store with his father's gun, a student and teacher debate the ending of a Raymond Carver story, a father sees in his adopted daughter -a story built to parallel mine.- Through their wide range of subject matter, the poems in The Next Place assert as fascinating as the surface of this world is, it is only the beginning of what we need to understand this place and our existence in it.