87 North
MICHAEL COFFEY

The poems in Michael Coffey's <87 North> map a complex journey-by car, by train, in spirit, in a poetics-from New York City, where he lives, to the environs of his youth in the Adirondacks, where he was raised by adoptive parents in a town of about seven hundred people. "In this book, I try to convey both the sense of living in a metropolis teeming with the impersonal and that of being in an expanded terrain in which everything makes sense, if only because one knows it so well, and everyone knows everybody." <87 North> begins with a surreal guidebook invoking John Ashbery and Max Ernst while still engaging memories of a rural uprbringing, and ends with a simple family recipe. Throughout, the rhythms of city life-jazz riffs, traffic, overhead street dialogue-alternate with epiphanies of the restorative power of language, memory, and experience.