These poems explore desire in its many forms—sensual, emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual—confronting an infinite cosmos, existential separateness and vulnerability, violence, injustice, and death. This book enacts a running conversation with American cultural history, neuroscience, particle physics, religion, baseball, zoology, other poems and poets, jazz, blues, and zydeco, ranging through time and across New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Virginia, and points in between and beyond.

The Oracle at Amarillo

Find the motel laundry room,
the one windowsill
smudged with ash and charred butts,
coffee stains and feedlot dust.

Listen through highway sighs,
gazing at the empty parking lot,
the fence shedding its brown paint,
and what’s left of the sky.

All questions will be answered.