Streets in Their Own Ink Poems

"Streets in Their Own Ink. . . has a gritty realism infused with a sense of the marvelous." --Edward Hirsch,The Washington Post In a city like that one might sail through life led by a runaway hat. The young scattered in whatever directions their wild hair pointed and, gusting into one another, they fell in love. -from "Windy City" In his second book of poems, Stuart Dybek finds vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated works of fiction. The poems of Streets in Their Own Ink map the internal geographies of characters who inhabit severe and often savage city streets, finding there a tension that transfigures past and present, memory and fantasy, sin and sanctity, nostalgia and the need to forget. Full of music and ecstasy, they consecrate a shadowed, alternate city of dreams and retrospection that parallels a modern city of hard realities. Ever present is Dybek's signature talent for translating "extreme and fantastic events into a fabulous dailiness, as though the extraordinary were everywhere around us if only someone would tell us where to look" (Geoffrey Wolff).

Stuart Dybek's books include I Sailed with Magellan (FSG, 2003), The Coast of Chicago (Picador, 2003), and a previous volume of poetry, Brass Knuckles. A professor of English at Western Michigan University, he lives in Kalamazoo.

IWindy CityAutobiographyBathThe VolcanoThe Sunken GardenFish CampBenedictionGinny's BasementMowingChristeningNarcissusBoundaryShoesaChordElection DayAngelus II.SirensCurrentSwanSeven SentencesSleepersKitty-CornerNight WalkThe Estrangement of Luis LeonCurtainsThree WindowsMajaViewJournalThree NocturnesNylonVigil III.VespersRevelationAnti-Memoir Acknowledgments