A medley of voices in dialogue with each other, this book-length poem underscores the destructiveness and hypocrisy of American venture.

Christian Barter’s first book of poems, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize, and his second collection, In Someone Else’s House, was the winner of a 2014 Maine Literary Award. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, North American Review, The American Scholar, and other magazines, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The PBS Newshour, and The Writer’s Almanac. He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and he was a Hodder Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. He is a supervisor of the trail crew at Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Acadia.

Table of Contents

Part 1: The Warm Land

Part 2: The Meaning of Being Numerous

Part 3: And All the Lives to Be

Part 4: Secret Evidence

Part 5: The Print of the Nails or The Rest Is Silence