We

In his new book, entitled We, Lowell Jaeger turns his exacting eye on family, friends, and strangers, delving for our common humanity in the many senses of the term common as ordinary, public, and shared. The poems, though they may range across time, portray a soul community in a rough and tumble place, an American place of tragedy and redemption, where someone can as easily drive past a homeless person as give the pregnant teenage waitress a forty dollar tip. No one's a hero, nor is anyone downright evil. His allies are workers: weary housewives, sewage drainers, hotel maids, bartenders. No one's perfect, and he lets no one off the hook, whether father, neighbor, or himself. If there is a message here, it's we've got to keep trying, which is probably the most humane message of them all. (Melissa Kwasny author of Reading Novalis in Montana)