B. H. Fairchild

Local Knowledge

An early collection, now in trade paperback, by the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

ALTHOUGH MANY OF THE POEMS here unfold among the small towns, abandoned farms, and slate skies of the rural Midwest, their larger landscape is the sheer fact—geographical, psychological, metaphysical— of "absences like so many lighted windows as you walk through a strange city, wanting to fill them with imaginary lives and words and stories."