About the Book:In this ambitious collection, Kevin Stein enters the volatile intersection of private lives and larger public history. In poems variously formal and experimental, improvisational and narrative, wisely silly and playfully forlorn, Stein renders the human carnival flexed across the tattooed bulk of historys bicep. Musical and refreshingly unaffected, Steins poems yoke the domains of high and low art. His poems address subjects by turns surprising, edgy, and humorous. They offer musings on the Slinky and the atomic bomb, elegies for a miscarried pregnancy and the late physicist Edward Teller, reflections on night-shift factory work and President Eisenhowers golf caddy, and meditations on the politics of post-colonialism and a youthful antiwar streaking incident. Against this vivid backdrop parades a motley cast of American characters seeking wiry balance in a fragile world.Table of Contents: One Autumnal 3 Sufficiency of the Actual 5 On Being a Nielsen Family 7 (My) History of Parsley 8 September Falls Is No River’s 10 News Crawl 11 Mars’ Karma 12 Lives of the Painters 14 Middle-aged Adam’s and Eve’s Bedside Tables 16 Ike’s Caddy 18 Talk Radio 23 Blue Tuesday 24 In Human Hands 26Two To Balance 31 Postcard to Henry James 33 Capitalism 34 A Day’s Work 36 Song of the Night Shift Foreman 38 On Thinking of the Second Time They Sholved Up Mr. Lincoln 40 Pre-Bowdlerized Version of Poem for a Fourth-Grade Illinois History Text 43 CR5115STD Responds to the National Consumer Survey 45 Post-Feminist Machismo 47 Poet’s Genie 48 Parakeet and Dark Star 49 Mowing the Lawn 50Three Appetites Early and Other 53 Aesthetics of Desire 55 Natural Selection 58 Religion 60 Upon the Porch Swing’s Time Machine 61 To My Hair 63 Lovesong Ending with ( ) 65 At the Mountain Man Rendezvous in Fairplay, Colorado 67 Inverse Aviary in which Birds Talk 69 On Reading Prince Valiant in the Sunday Comics 71 Slippery Slope 73 Colonialism 74 Parable of the American Stag Party 76 Arts of Joy 78 Youthful Indiscretions 79