Jim Daniels' collection bears witness to a life both mis- and well-spent: to the family, remembered and new; to the melancholy pull of drugs and casual sex; to growing up; and to the only tenable way of growing old, which is to embrace every small joy even as one laments its brevity. Indeed, Night with Drive-By Shooting Stars rages not against the dying of light but the dying fall itself--against poetic and existential complacency. Louder, kids, says Daniels in the beautiful Cold Seed: daddy's dying.

A poet of the working-class and city streets, Jim Daniels's fourteenth poetry collection travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence.

Out here, silence scrapes its knuckles
in an attempt at prayer.

Jim Daniels is Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Melon. Poetry editor for the scholarly journal Labor: A Working...