What makes the idea of a cross-country road trip so compelling? The open road is possibility. The continent is vast, the destination beside the point. It’s about presence and place, the intersection of lives and landscapes, experience and connection. This book translates that big-sky spirit of freedom and discovery into a journey in another mode: poetry.

The hundred poems gathered here are full of grit and kitsch and wisdom, longing and soul and local flavor. To come along on this ride is to dance on a New York City rooftop at sunrise, commune with saguaros and ancient bristlecone pines, visit ghost towns and the world’s tallest barber pole, and meet an indelicate Floridian inner-tube guide named Jerry. Across these pages are roadside motels and tourist traps, cars set on fire and driven off cliffs, moonshine and deviled eggs and gestures toward the infinite. A poetic cross-section of a wide and complicated country, this collection ranges from shorelines to cornfields, over mountains and canyons and deserts and the highways in between, exploring as it does the larger meaning of departure and return, rootedness and movement, liminal spaces and home places. There’s harmony and mess here, grief and joy, lost loves, found selves, and this is something poetry can do: remind us where we’ve been and where we’re going, how the places we inhabit shape us, what we’ve left behind and what we’re bringing, all of us travelers.

Places on the Way

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