Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics
Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate is a poetry collection composed across more than thirty years, moving through landscapes shaped by labor, infrastructure, inheritance, and loss. The poems attend to what persists at the edge of visibility: workers, animals, damaged places, quiet rituals, and moments where meaning resists explanation. Rather than building toward revelation or resolution, the work sustains presence through restraint, repetition, and duration.
The collection unfolds in distinct compositional phases. Early poems carry tension and estrangement through compressed lyric forms and charged observation. As the book progresses, that intensity loosens into drift, fracture, and atmospheric suspension. Later sequences slow the field, allowing endurance, recurrence, and ethical composure to emerge. Throughout, the poems resist spectacle. They favor attention over assertion and remain alert to the pressures of modern life without reducing experience to argument.
Paired with the poems is The Groaning Book, a companion volume that listens closely to how the collection is made. Part essay, part field guide, it offers interpretive readings, structural analysis, and artistic lineage for each poem without collapsing ambiguity. Literature, music, and visual art are treated as parallel systems of attention, shaping the work's rhythm, tone, and ethical posture.
A central section of the companion volume documents sustained civic cultural work in both Chicago and Cleveland, including leadership in public poetry institutions and humane organizations, long-term public service, interdisciplinary collaboration, and engagement with care as a civic practice. This history grounds the poems in lived responsibility rather than abstraction, situating lyric work within a broader ethical and public field.
Together, the poems and companion form a single composition: one volume holding experience in suspension, the other listening to how that holding is achieved. The project proposes a poetics shaped by restraint, public presence, and ethical attention, offered against a culture of speed, performance, and certainty.
This is a book for readers drawn to poetry that lingers rather than declares, that trusts atmosphere over explanation, and that remains open to what cannot be resolved.
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