These are poems of the present, of commercials and human interest stories, of the drive-in windows that make banks and bedrooms of our cars. These poems trace the faint erasures of time and human relationships-following runners as they pause by the Ticonderoga ferry and Lake Champlain, riding with tourists across a river to an old fort, the distant sounds of a historic slaughter obscured by the misfiring pistons of an inboard motor and by the unforgiving surf.

Describing the world he has seen and loved as well as how that world sometimes threatens itself, Gary Margolis speaks with caring humor and seriousness of the brokenness and beauty of America's present.