Description
Miles Wilson's poetry considers a life lived in the American West, in a family, in a body that bears the residue of blue-collar work long into adulthood, and the undoing of that body by age. These are fiercely honest poems about how a man’s life can meander through pain and indiscretion, anger and bitterness; how it can express itself in rage and pungent wit and find a kind of healing in the natural world of mountains and trout streams.

Reviews
“The language here is so muscular, the metaphors so sharply and freshly drawn, the insights so unsentimental, that I was won over to the breadth and depth of the work, the new facets of masculinity revealed by a writer who insists on telling the blunt and rocky truth about what it has meant to him to be a man.” —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Writing the Sacred into the Real

“In his highly re-readable compressions of a difficult lifetime, Wilson’s depth and craft give lessons in the force of few words, the unsaid as a presence.” —Reg Saner, author of Climbing into the Roots

“This is some of the most powerful contemporary American poetry I’ve read.” —Gregory L. Candela, Southwest BookViews, Autumn 2003

Winner of the 2003 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Poetry Book.