The painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin, intended as the painter's final artistic testimony, is the inspiration and framework for this book. In one way, "The Gauguin Answer Sheet" focuses on the intricate details of the painting and offers its lush Tahitian landscape and characters--a black dog, a pair of conspirators, a shy woman, a pleading goddess, and a crouching mummy, among many others. In another sense, Dennis Finnell deeply probes the underlying implications--and personal associations--the painting offers.

The poem's own questions, suggested by those in the painting's title, are concerned with origins, identities, and futures--of the poet and others. Finnell reflects on the plight of the characters portrayed in Gauguin's painting and imagines their thoughts and feelings about life in the world outside. Along with his ruminations on these imagined characters, Finnell visits his own family history, reflecting on the lives of earlier generations, to affirm the shared nature of each individual's origins and identities. Through his poetry, time and space, painting and history, and imagination and reality interconnect and offer an unusually imaginative, surprising work of art.

Beloved Beast is an American travelogue of sorts, says Dennis Finnell. In part it records a cross-country trek by car and by air from the Catskills to L. A. and halfway back, with encounters along the way with Washington Irving's headless horseman and Rip Van Winkle, Humphrey Bogart's Nick in Knock on Any Door, an ersatz Huck Finn working the tourists in Hannibal, and others. "One might say that these poems are about being an ego", Finnell explains, "an I, America's most highly mythologized product, and how being this American self increasingly means being isolated, a party of one. I suppose the beloved beast is me, is us, our country, our selves, and the poems here trace out the figures of the beast - lyrical, social, cultural".