At the heart of Joshua Weiner s new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet s point of view with Walt Whitman s to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC. For Weiner, Rock Creek is the location of myriad kinds of movement, streaming, and joining: personal enterprise and financial capital; national politics, murder, sex, and homelessness; the Civil War and collective history; music, spiritual awakening, personal memory, and pastoral vision. The...