Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom: The First Five Books

This volume collects approximately 250 poems, selected and thematically reorganized from the poet's highly acclaimed first five books. Here are poems evoking landscapes from the Gulf of Mexico to La Push, heartscapes inhabited by day-laborers, waitresses, bikers,rioters, philologists, weight-lifters and magicians (men and women old and young, black, white, Native American); and here too are evocations exploring what's it's like to have been a son, and to be a father. All are performed on a keyboard ranging from the resonant bass notes of despair to the ringing upper registers of ecstasy and uncut joy. Whether Root is writing deeply personal or mythic poems, what emerges from the collection, whole and entire, has all the power, daring and beauty of an individual vision.