Michael Durbin spends his first nine years with Maron Halvorsen, an aging religious fanatic who has decided that he is retarded and that God wants her to isolate him from the world. They live with Johann, her husband who is in the final stages of Parkinson's. As Michael gets older, he escapes to the second-floor where Maron, crippled by arthritis, cannot reach him. In the dark filthy second floor of the house, behind windows glazed by soot and dirt, he invents his own world, chants snatches of conversations he overhears, Bible verses, prayers. When Maron dies, he is discovered lying in a nest of old photographs, his face dirty and his hair wild. The press gives him the name of Rat Boy and he enters the County Farm with this nickname and receives many others. Here he learns about sex, friendship, betrayal and encounters religious fanaticism again. A parallel narrative records the attempt of Bernice Ylvesaker to write the life story of Michael Durbin as a favor to a fellow county home patient Joshua Brent, who has taken an interest in Michael.

Irene Marston moves from Manhattan with her businessman husband to his hometown in Iowa. Stranded in a small town on the shore of a sea of cornfields, she looks for rescue in her painting, unlikely friendships and sex. At the same time she creates a fantasy journal of a successful life in New York and another journal where she describes the paintings she plans to paint. As her life unravels, she is plagued by the romantically addled fans of The Bridges of Madison County, who know about her husband's infidelity and see her as open to anything.

The poems in Bugs have Us Surrounded deals directly with bugs and people at the same time. It is ironic and serious, careful of sound and expansive in diction. The cover and the illustrations are by Canadian-Puerto Rican artist MaryAnn Mackinnon.