An early collection by the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although many of the poems here unfold among the small towns, abandoned farms, and slate skies of the rural Midwest, their larger landscape is the sheer fact; geographical, psychological, metaphysical; of "absences like so many lighted windows as you walk through a strange city, wanting to fill them with imaginary lives and words and stories." A careful poet of understated intelligenceÂ…Fairchild has risen from obscurity to big reviews and major prizes. -- Publishers Weekly B. H. Fairchild is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including The Blue Buick and Usher . A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize, he lives in California.