Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award, this book-length poem is a collection of voices-in-dialogue-overheard, remembered, internal-that represents the mind at work as it considers the destructiveness of humanity, the hypocrisy bred in the bones of American venture. Voices from personal conversations, political speeches, Guantanamo detainees, news, and poets fill these pages, capturing a world of disrupted beauty and unrealized potential.

Christian Barter is the author of three books of poetry: In Someone Else's House, winner of the 2014 Maine Literary Award; The Singers I Prefer, a Lenore Marshall Prize finalist; and Bye-Bye Land, winner of the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions. His poetry appears widely in such places as Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Epoch, Georgia Review, and The American Scholar, and has been featured on The Writer's Almanac, Poetry Daily, and PBS Newshour. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and The McDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University. For more than 25 years, he has worked as a stone worker, rigger, arborist, equipment operator, and supervisor at Acadia National Park, where he is currently serving as the first-ever Poet Laureate.

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