Travelers Aid Society

Poetry. TRAVELERS AID SOCIETY is a collection of poems intimately related to music, cities, and the insightful perceptions of a peripatetic speaker. The reader is led through different historical, socio–cultural, and political happenings and contexts by a keen observer. Sirkin reveals treasures in what we might otherwise take for granted and deem as mundane: a conversation at a bar, a plumber at work, cold winters in Buffalo, mornings with family reading the Cincinnati Enquirer, dealing with bureaucracy when crossing the Juárez–El Paso border, the Ohio River in the late nineteenth century, going through LPs, and more. Music appears interwoven throughout the book as a kind of soundtrack, including songs by Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bing Crosby, among others.