Brenda Coultas’s prose poems take us on a well-documented tour from the Bowery, pre-1900 and post-9/11, to southern Indiana, pre-automobile and post-genetic engineering. Her poems are sculptures pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public.

Before becoming a poet, Brenda Coultas was a farmer, a carny, a taffy maker, a park ranger, a waitress in a disco ballroom, and the second woman welder in Firestone Steel’s history. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, Epoch, Fence, and Open City. She lives one block from the Bowery in New York City.