Rooted in the rich loam of a mythic southern New Jersey, Never Far From the Egg Harbor Ice House collects thirty-six poems that conjure times, places, characters, cultural obscurities, and blunt facts. Form, rhetoric, rhythm, music, and imagery occur in great variety: Brief lyrics; serpentine narratives; demotic odes; polemics; elegies; and more. Before they wind to a close, some of the poems quarrel with, despair of, and revel in the "I" at their cores, even as other pronouns jostle for attention. The book offers no false reassurances or easy epiphanies, instead embodying ambiguity in all its richness. With their every syllable, these poems say "Listen!"
