As a perennial outsider, the speaker traverses through loneliness, consumerism, and silence, until he sees his personal history as communal. It's a quest to honor the complexity of the mind and heart over time--a quest for justice, love, and compassion. Cultural forces and conventions--repression, prejudice, power regimes-- frame feelings of powerlessness, and are explored deeply in this collection.
Ira Sadoff is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, including Barter, and Grazing (U. of Illinois), a novel, O. Henry prize-winning short stories, and The Ira Sadoff Reader (a collection of stories, poems, and essays about contemporary poetry). He is the recipient of a Creative Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation. His poems have been widely anthologized, including in the Harper Anthology of American Literature, and The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Great American Prose Poems, and The Best American Poetry 2002 and 2008.
