A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
camp song and hymn, came in along the winding

way where rural declined to suburban, slow
riders and wagoners passing a cow staked

to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
up--not in vacant lots the ancient icons

of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
in sacrifices and customs of bride-price

or dowry. (It's good people no longer make
blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,

for example, and in the crunching gravel
parking lots of small churches--oh but we...

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience--a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more--these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has...

This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings--city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court--as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience--the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry...