Without a Map

Rivers course through Gary Lark's Without A Map, rivers rising and rivers fished and rivers welcoming on hot summer days, as do the rhythms of money and want in a kid picking beans, a mother who brings home donuts from the donut shop, a father's shifts at the mill and a man who works the "creek, /dump and back yards" for what he needs to survive. In poem after compelling poem, Lark gives voice to lives which all too often go unheard, lives lived in rural towns, trailer courts and farm houses on the back roads, places where he has grown up, lived and worked, listening all along to the stories that truly matter: what it means to lose a job, and what it means to have one; what it means to fight in wars whose memory never leaves and what it means to be lost then found again. Now it's our turn to listen and to be grateful for these poems, the breadth of their understated eloquence and the lives they dignify.