In Traveling in Notions Michael J. Rosen creates a novel in poems, a questing contemplation, an alter ego Gordon Penn who holds to hopefulness amid circumstances that will have none of it. Penn is a widower, a soon-to-retire notions salesman, a Midwestern family man whom Rosen describes as akin to characters found in John Cheever's or John Updike's tales or to Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo. Each poem in the collection relates another episode in Penn's ongoing confrontation with contemporary society. Penn's "notions" are attempts at discovering some homeostasis, some sense of home, or, at least,...