Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems,[B. H. Fairchild] is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic. One of the most readable poets of our time. . .? This is poetry of the extraordinary ordinary, nonpareil. I have no trouble ranking [Fairchild] with the best poets of his generation. Acause of celebration. . . . Noisy, visually arresting poems, full of occult weather systems, the barbed nostalgia of a man born into one world, now inhabiting another . . . [Fairchild] has spent a lifetime singing the body electric of small, dying towns, day-laborers and the beers at the end of their day, the pressure it puts on the man who must remember it all. US