Poems about time and loss, chaos and creation. Rural and urban 
settings ranging from the mid-20th-century Midwest and 
contemporary New England to dream countrysides and surreal 
cities of exile. Includes twelve "little prayers," after Paul Goodman, 
with an epigraph from Goodman.


"Lee Rudolph is among the least boring poets I know. His bold, 
inventive work keeps handing us fresh surprises, from the surreal 
hilarity of the title poem to the moving 'Little Prayers.' Master of 
many instruments, Rudolph can deliver fat-free free verse as well 
as song lyrics ('Lullaby'), experimental forms ('Escape Reading,' 
'Scraps from the Dream Newspaper'), and tightly rhymed lyrics 
('Beauty,' 'Weather Report'). You never know what to expect 
from him, except that each poem will be powerful, arresting, and 
original."—X. J. Kennedy

"I love these strange, witty, passionate poems, so rare in their range 
of far and near, here and there, light and dark. 'A singing lamp,' 
'lamp skull.'"—Jean Valentine

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LEE RUDOLPH was a founding member of the Alice James 
Poetry Cooperative, which published his first two books of poetry, 
Curses (1974) and The Country Changes (1978). He is also the 
author of Calculus of Elementary Functions (1969) and many 
research papers on "low-dimensional topology," the field of 
mathematics in which he has earned most of his living since 1974. 
He lives in southeastern Massachusetts.