Rural Routes

"Ralph Ellison has a character who says, "If you don't know where you are, you probably don't know who you are." The people that Mike Lewis-Beck conjures in Rural Routes are so enmeshed in their landscapes that where they are and who they are flicker so quickly as to become one continuous light. This is the glow of the all-night diner, the lunar light of eggs. Summer storms, lightning bugs in a jar, a faint dawn "but enough to navigate our fall field of corn." This is a book you can see by. These poems map their way through familiar terrains made new and strange by the clarity of his vision and the swoon of his song. James D'Agostino, author of Weathermanic