"X" is the kiss and betrayal, the embrace, the crucifixion, the mathematical unknown. In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a "vertigo of solitude" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. "What did I love that made me believe it would last?" he asks.

"Something has to be true enough to be
Taken for granted.
In the hospital I saw
An old man
Caressing the face of an old woman.
This same man, young, caressed her face
In just that way.
That's the stillness
At the center of change--
A sadness worth dying for, I swear--
There is no other.
"--from "Dying into What I've Done"

"James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."--"The Nation"

"In James Galvin we have a superior poet."--"American Book Review"

"Galvin's poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure."--"Harvard Review"

James Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recently "Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997," which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/"The Nation "Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, "The Meadow "and a novel, "Fencing the Sky." He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

The complete works of an extraordinary poet who consistently refines the notion of what constitutes an "American" sound.

"James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."--"The Nation"

"Galvin's poems seem straightforward enough--but they're not....Galvin writes here like a force of nature. VERDICT: Excellent reading for contemporary poetry enthusiasts not looking for the overblown."--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

James Galvin's poems have zero percent body fat. His tightly controlled and detailed poems evoke measured optimism in a spare existential world where certain characters--"The Mastermind" and the "Members of the Board"--are recurring shadows. Like fables suggesting new truths, personal narratives and love poems intertwine to confront the various paradoxes of domestic life, art, and politics, and the line "All poems are love poems" leans hard against "Some poems are better off dead." In "As Is," both claim their hard-won place.

"I think black holes are just plastic"
"Garbage bags blowing down the midnight highway"
"That is the Universe. "
"There aren't as many dimensions as we thought."
"A black hole can disappear anything that nears it."
"We all know that."
"The farthest away I've ever been is in my own home, "
"Finally cleaning out my daughter's room"
"So another little girl can live here."
"The black plastic bag I held in my hand"
"Was infinitely capacious."
"I mean I could throw anything in there."

James Galvin is a Wyoming rancher and on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of six books of poetry, a novel, and the acclaimed memoir The Meadow. He lives in Tie Siding, Wyoming, and Iowa City, Iowa.

Poetry. This fourth collection from the author of the prose masterpiece The Meadow is inspired by the often harsh subrural landscape of southwestern Wyoming where Galvin has spent most of the past decade building a log home, beginning with the felling of trees. Firsthand knowledge of the expansive landscape of the west provides perspective more than mere imagery, reducing human activity to its proper dimension. Galvin adds a kind of pre-Socratic intelligence, a stoical turn of mind, and genuine love of hard physical work to make poems that are direct, spare, compact, and stripped of rhetorical or aesthetic device.

"At its best, Red Line can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs . . . a brave and interesting book." -David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Charles Bowden's Red Line is a look at America through the window of the southwest. His vision is as nasty, peculiar, brutal, as it is intriguing and, perhaps, accurate. Bowden offers consciousness rather than consolation, but in order to do anything about our nightmares we must take a cold look and Red Line casts the coldest eye in recent memory." -Jim Harrison One of Charles Bowden's earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge-and decaying at its center. Bowden's quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it.

From critically acclaimed author of The Meadow comes a haunting novel of the American West.

Circumstances spiral out of control when an accidental murder springs from the best intentions. With one man dead and another on the run, this is a story about violence and how it destroys lives when the land is at stake. This lyrical first novel--long-awaited by the many admirers of James Galvin's The Meadow--is nothing less than the story of the disappearance of the American West.