Poetry. A quiet lyric grace informs the poems of James Brock, a grace which never fails to console and locate their speaker, even in the midst of his restless odyssey among many American landscapes. The poems speak with a subtle necessity and authority, both as they confront the bagaries of daily living and as they perform their more demanding investigation into the meaning of loss. These are poems that understand, as one of his lines puts it, 'the inchoate currents of desire' --- David Wojahn. In this powerful collection, James Brock allows us to listen in on a fascinating argument between geography and the imagination. To describe a hugely various country, pulsing with radio talk, and covered with interstate highways, shopping malls, museums, beaches and potato fields is an ambitious project, but to show us how we become exiles and dreamers in our own land is to illuminate the inner landscape as well --- Maura Stanton.