These poems by award-winning author Dennis Hathaway are meditations on life and death through a variety of perspectives. In the title poem, a man reading about shipwrecked sailors driven to cannabilism is led to reflect on a particularly intense time of his youth. In The Promised Land, the boundless optimism of youth is captured in the observations of a young man escaping the Midwest for California, while Southern California (Revised) paints a disturbing picture of that iconic place's future. In Documents of War and The Harrying of the North, official documents and a famous tapestry are used to illustrate the distance most of us maintain from the grim realities of war. The spectacles of natural worlds both large and small are lyrically evoked in River of Wind and Fauna, while the abiding love between a man and his wife is the subject of The Path, The Philosophy of Love and several other poems that combine sharp observation of the everyday details of life with flights of imagination. But despite the seriousness of subject matter, many of the 25 poems in this collection have an ample seasoning of humor, from the overt in Money and Queen of Spades" to the more subtle in Memory and Santa Inez. Dennis Hathaway was born and raised on an Iowa farm and now lives with his wife, Laura Silagi, in Venice, California. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines, including TriQuarterly, the Georgia Review, and the Southwest Review, and his story collection, The Consequences of Desire, received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He taught fiction writing at UCLA and has published non-fiction in the Los Angeles Times, MS, NewWorld, and CityWatch. He has worked as a journalist, building contractor, and staff member of a non-profit housing corporation and YouthBuild program for at-risk youth. He is past president of the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, an L.A.-based non-profit working to limit outdoor advertising. He spends his spare time hiking, mountain climbing, and tinkering with his classic muscle car. Laura Silagi is a native New Yorker and artist who works primarily in photography and video. She was a founding member of the feminist art group, Mother Art, and was the producer and director of the film, Mother Art Tells Her Story, which has shown at a number of film festivals in the United States and Canada. With the group, The Artists Formerly Known as Women, she has exhibited installations in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities. She is currently working on a collection of her short videos.