This first book of poems was chosen by Charles Wright as the winner of the 1991 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Of his work Greg Glazner has written: My poems often take as their starting points the landscape of the West--at times immense and impersonal, and at times a ground for human conflict. The sources are various: Texas farm life, suburban aspirations, television, Baptist oratory, northern New Mexico, the Montana wildernesses. But I hope that, finally, my work is about themes: living in the face of death, of violence, of bitterness, and finding a way to praise that living without looking away from its real terms. There's great passion in Greg Glazner's thoughtful meditations, passion for language, for memory, for humanity and the natural world. It is a verse rich in music and emotional layerings from a voice that gives us the strength to ask ourselves what we might be able, after all, to endure/among the ordinary blooms, dissolutions, /the frantic pleasures & denials, /the iron & hallucinatory beauty of our days.