A Path Between Houses (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Selected by Alicia OstrikerThese are tough-minded poems about loss, and what comes afterwards—the difficult work of rebuilding a life. Greg Rappleye gathers his material across a vast American landscape, from the Florida Keys through the Nevada Desert to the California Coast, rocketing around the country with some strange friends—Odysseus, William Faulkner, Frank Sinatra, and private eye Jim Rockford. Rappleye is not afraid to implicate the self, building a heroic persona in the classic sense—a person in whom the flaws are as celebrated as the occasional triumph.