That rush in between when it all comes undone. Knowing its edge like your own pulse and breathing. As I knew them this morning, racing a 10K in late-spring heat, the taste of panic in the last two miles as everything slipped away, losing time and barely finishing. A tingling in my limbs as if I were driving on ice, the road beneath me suddenly gone, the feeling of that in my hands. Deeper than words, being lost for a moment and then being done. Left with a pounding, stiff-legged stagger. Spiritual improvisations, radiant acts of attention: echoing Thoreau's Walden, the meditations of Guy Davenport, and Kenny Moore's groundbreaking articles for Sports Illustrated, Thomas Gardner strides through inner and outer landscapes. Freed by disciplined effort, the runner's mind here roams and mourns and remembers. "The achievement of 'Poverty Creek Journal' is precisely that it does retrace that kind of wandering--and, in so doing, makes something lovely and meaningful of a difficult year. Gardner does not go in for pat analogies; he does not claim, as Camus once did about soccer, that running taught him everything about death. Nor does he go in for pat consolation. His journal does not so much end as stop, as if he has simply not yet risen for the next morning's run." -- Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker --Review Thomas Gardner was born in Indiana, raised in New Jersey and Western Maryland, and now lives and teaches in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the edge of the Jefferson National Forest. He attended Bucknell University, where he ran cross country and track, then earned graduate degrees from Syracuse and Wisconsin. His most recent books are A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson (Oxford, 2006) and John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination (Baylor, 2011). His play "Eurydice" was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006. He has been a professor of English at Virginia Tech since 1982, and he still regularly competes as a runner.