Scope and Contents

Joshua Beckman gave the Sackners this book on the occasion of a visit to the Archive owing to his interest in exhibiting examples of cancelled text for a museum in Seattle. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Gerald Stern contributed a critical introductory essay. Amazon.com review: Joshua Beckman, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is one of those poets whose work you mustn't miss. His talent shines in his ability to make disparate events become part of a whole. "Purple Heart Highway" constructs loss as imminent danger ("where a train might mistakenly come") or as the pendulum between routine and chaos ("a gray grinning calmness / from which you can get nothing to wake") or as a sudden realization that threads far back into one's past ("I woke up to a plate full of no options / echoing through the cupped ear of my life / spinning the wheels that wouldn't, / for anything, take me away").In "Winter's Horizon" the theme of loss seeks--and finds--its own sensibilities. A boy writes a story about a father who rides off into the sunset on his riding lawnmower. The boy feels his story is full of meaning, his mother hates it, and his teacher gives it an A+. Yet the lines between...