Most poems in J.M. Green’s The Novice Angler have been published in both print and online literary journals and some have won local or national awards. Together these poems hold hands and dive deeper into life’s murky waters. They become a tale of the guideless male who awkwardly, sometimes painfully, casts line after line hoping to catch the true meaning of manhood and masculinity. From boyhood through young adulthood, he continues to catch nothing. Only as we enter poems of family loss and abandonment do nibbles and bites appear and by the end of this short collection there is hope he has caught the big fish. A chapbook that begins with a powerful secret and ends with a powerful secret, but in two very different rivers.