Following Spring Comes to Chicago--winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Prize--Campbell McGrath's newest collection goes on the road to chart a poetics of place and everyday experience. Set in diverse and finely observed landscapes from Brazil to Manitoba, Las Vegas to McGrath's home in Miami Beach, the poems in Road Atlas range thematically from a cultural critique of Jimmy Buffett to a discussion of cartoon epistemology with a skeptical child to an imaginary journey from Campbell, Florida, to McGrath, Alaska.
With its careful mix of image and narrative, as well as its sculptural prose variations, Road Atlas seeks to stretch the form of the contemporary poem to encompass travel writing, flash fiction, and lyric meditations upon the loneliness of the road, the joys of fatherhood, and the nature of poetry itself.
Road Atlas is the most personal and emotionally accessible book yet from one of the most distinctive and highly lauded American poets of his generation.