Hayden Carruth's National Book Award-winning collection draws on seven decades of life and poetry to produce work of remarkable emotional range and technical mastery. The title poem, which gives the book its slightly louche atmosphere, opens a collection that moves between erotic memory, political anger, rural observation, and late-life reckoning. Carruth, who spent decades as a working poet in rural Vermont while battling mental illness and poverty, writes from outside the academic mainstream that dominated American poetry during his career. His forms range from strictly metered verse to loose-limbed free verse, from brief lyrics to extended sequences. The poems in this collection show a poet who has earned the right to make direct statements about love, death, and beauty—statements that would seem pretentious from a younger writer but carry authority when backed by a lifetime's experience and craft. Carruth writes about jazz musicians, fellow poets, neighbors, lovers, and the landscape he inhabited for decades, finding in these ordinary subjects occasions for philosophical depth. The collection has the feeling of a summa, a gathering of late wisdom from a poet who had been unfairly neglected and was finally receiving recognition. Readers will find both individual poems that reward repeated attention and a cumulative portrait of a distinctive sensibility engaged with the world's beauty and pain.