About the Book

This is Ernest Yatess ninth volume of poems, and the sixth volume in an ongoing cycle based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia.

Yatess turns through city streets, recalling the wilderness wanderings of Bash in 17th-century Japan, and especially the wanderings of the rivers and mountains poets of the Tang and pre-Tang dynasties of China.

Receptive to his terrain as they were to theirs, Yates relies on syncopated rhythms, fragmentation, and abrupt rhetorical turns to capture his responses to that terrain.

A portrait of Philadelphia emerges—its diverse citizenry, streetscape, and history, as these are revealed in phenomena of the streets themselves.