Overview
In these carved and crafted out of hardscrabble poems. Jeff Vande Zande makes seamless the natural world and the worlds constructed by the human. He is our Virgil leading us through the daily grinding down of our hearts, through the realization that the violence and splendor of the outside world has its inner equivalent. Early on in this gently savage collection, Vande Zande's narrator goes down into the basement of his family home and discovers the overlooked, forsaken, and in all the corners, those things one wants to forget but refuses or can't discard. It is a fitting metaphor. In these basements we find our history and the mold growing on it. About halfway through the collection, the narrator's voice, so full of a terrible beauty when talking of his father, suddenly turns tender, almost muted. It's then that we discover that he is now a father. The book becomes a testimony that this father has broken the circle in the basement of hell, has " come out/wanting to be ready in case the pilot life goes out." -Jack Ridl