Acknowledgments
“Water was always the problem surrounding”
Part I/Milking the Wasted Land
Burning Down the Camper
Jersey Devil
His Grandmother as a Wind Chime
Scrap Iron
Bivalve, Cumberland County
On Peeling Skin
Midnight Shift
Our Lady of Mount Carmel
The Pecking Order
Standing in the Atlantic Ocean with Tesla’s Pigeon
Palace Depression
Part II/Volleying Across the Showery Dark
So Intricate, So Inconceivably Complex
On Thunderstorms
Field Lessons
Working First Shift at the Progresso Soups Factory
The Island Meditations
“Dew-matted mornings, I woke to my father”
“Little scissor-snip scars the length of her fingers.”
“So tell me, what’s it like over there? Tell me all about it.”
“The way I was raised ‘ignorant’ only meant rude,”
“It is an art I can only fake—how I prune pine boughs”
“On the Bus-Eirann through Galway City center”
“I have been here for months and still”
“By the very nature of a trip, there is a departure”
Part III/Defending the Entrance to the Hereafter
A Bridge is Like a Tongue
The Same Idea
Hounds
On Garages
Letter About My Last Night in Carbondale, Illinois
Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother In The Last Six Years
Conversion
Blackrock Diving Tower
Turkey Point
Notes