David Roderick’s second book, The Americans, pledges its allegiance to dirt. And to laptops. And to swimming pools, the Kennedys, a flower in a lapel, plastic stars hanging from the ceiling of a child’s room, churning locusts, a jar of blood, a gleam of sun on the wing of a plane. His poems swarm with life. They also ask an unanswerable question: What does it mean to be an American? Restless against the borders we build—between countries, between each other—Roderick roams from place to place in order to dig into the messy, political, idealistic and ultimately inexplicable idea of American-ness. His rangy, inquisitive lyrics stitch together a patchwork flag, which he stakes alongside all the noise of our construction, our obsessive building and making, while he imagines the fate of a nation built on desire.

Winner of the 2014 Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book published by an independent press.

David Roderick’s first book of poems, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize. He has published poetry and fiction in several journals, including the Hudson Review, the Georgia Review, Indiana Review, New England Review, Poetry, the Southern Review, Slate, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Roderick is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and was awarded the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship, among other honors. Poems from this collection have won Shenandoah’s James Boatwright III Prize and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, sponsored by Sarah Lawrence College. Roderick is associate professor of English in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.