From the Bowery to rural Southern Indiana, Coultas’s poems are a millennial roadmap of American life.

Brenda Coultas’s first full-length collection of prose poems takes 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. “The Bowery Project” is the longest poem in this collection and captures New York’s past and present in the visceral and visual way that is usually associated with photographs and documentaries. Later poems are set in rural, southern Indiana and the contrast between city and country dramatically illuminates the American culture and landscape—these poems are a millennial roadmap of American life.