Publisher's Synopsis
William Allen creates an imagistic world undergoing momentous changes in a series of poems based on titles of long-disappeared paintings from 19th-century New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister as well as in poems evoking smells, sights, sounds of mid-nineteenth century America along the Newtown Creek between Queens and Brooklyn.
Poems celebrate the Queensboro Bridge, echoing Hart Crane, Walt Whitman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminding us of our immigrant and revolutionary heritage. And inspired by Awkwafina and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, "21 Stations" evokes lives and music and history along the stations of the New York City 7 train, the 167 languages spoken there, journeying east out of the city.
