You Are Here: Poems New & Old

Winnowed from a distinguished career, then distilled, then polished and winnowed again, the poems in You Are Here are Leon Stokesbury’s most successful and finished from fifty year’s of published work.

The selections from his earlier volumes are as fully realized as one would expect from the winner of the AWP Poetry Competition and the Poets’ Prize. But it is in Stokesbury’s new work, collected under the heading These Days, that he shows us something completely different. From a county carnival sideshow to Hitchcock’s Mount Rushmore, from John Keats’s backyard to the miseries of a failed crematorium operator, every turning of a page reveals a particular we didn’t see coming. You Are Here truly seems like a sideshow of this modern world, even when we read and find, amazed, our own selves looking back at us.

Why do we still only stand here? Stokesbury asks in one of his earliest efforts. And all the other poems in this collection give him such varied answers that readers will have no idea what the next page holds, only that they will find themselves somewhere new.