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Weaves the author’s own four-month cross-country sojourn in a VW van with thoughts on travel narratives across the history of American literature

In Driving Lessons, Christopher B. Strain sets out on a quintessential American road trip, exploring not just the roads and byways of the country but the road trip’s place in American culture. Strain dives into the well of American travel writing, illuminating fascinating aspects of the road trip, such as how race, class, and gender shape the experiences of road trippers.

In the summer of 1998, amid a professional crisis of confidence, Strain settled on a plan to reconnect with both himself and the country he studies. He purchased a 1972 Volkswagen Westfalia van and set off on his own cross-country odyssey. In the weeks that followed, he ruminated on his own ongoing journey alongside great journeys from the past and how they reveal the heart of the traveler as well as the landscape of the nation.

Visiting archives and landmarks across the United States, Strain's journey became a parallel to the stories he studied—an opportunity to see and experience the cities, national parks, and monuments that define US history. Driving Lessons is a compelling blend of literary analysis and memoir, offering readers an insightful and heartfelt reflection on the enduring power of the American road trip.

Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024 is a panoramic collection of Daniel Tobin’s most exemplary, ambitious, and accomplished poems from nearly forty years at work in the art. These range from his award-winning first book, Where the World is Made, through successive volumes that reveal a progressive deepening of his essential themes even as the poems evolve to an ever more refined technical risk and mastery. These themes include the unflinching encounter with time, suffering, and mortality, as well as what one earlier reviewer called “a quest for transcendence, a search for the sacred.” They seek, in short, to do, as another reviewer observed, what Yeats said was “one ideal for poetry: to hold justice and reality in a single thought.” In so doing, Tobin’s poems probe the individual life in relation to the pressures of history, including his own family’s perilous and traumatic immigration from famine in the 19th century—a backstory he explores in The Narrows, which he has called “a mural in verse.” At the same time, his “Homage to Bartolomeo de las Casas” delves into the fraught early colonial history of the Americas through the eyes of the eponymous friar, a repentant colonizer. 

These earlier works establish Tobin’s mastery of the poetic sequence, among a wide variety of other formal displays, all amply evident in the books that follow, including the lyrically meditative orchestrations of Second Things, the award-winning poems of Belated Heavens, The Net, and Blood Labors, characterized at once by their compendious erudition, their sense of intellectual and cultural history, as well as their emotional urgency and formal variousness. This generous selection from Tobin’s work is intended to be a companion volume to The Mansions, his trilogy of book-length poems that explore twentieth century history, and the counter claims of science and religion, through three exemplary lives, which reviewers said inspired genuine awe. Finally,  Dusk, Empire leads with a gripping selection of new work that engages the enormous pressures and troubles of the present historical moment, set in dialogue with Tobin’s characteristic passion for what would transcend it. Or as he asks in “The Sand Painting,” “What is that joyous singing inside the rock / Though each intricate, lovely thing will be erased?”