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What binds these poems together is a desire to speak what goes unspoken. To reply into the void of empire and late capitalism with a howl of authenticity, not trying to separate parts of the self or parts of the culture, but to exist in all of it at once. This book is a portrait of survival through speech, story, politics, celebrity/star gazing, TV, and all forms of popular music. These poems engage with "Western tradition" and its unraveling, focusing on an economically insecure adjunct life in Pittsburgh, PA which is--against all odds--interrupted by love that entails moving to a safer country. These poems exist in conversation with the author's conservative Catholic upbringing, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, and poets ranging from Sappho to Elizabeth Bishop to Eazy-E. The poems inhabit a world where John Wayne stars in Manhattan and Rush Limbaugh stars in Boys Don't Cry, with elegies to Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner, finally culminating in a finale where the author rewrites (or translates, or reboots, or "covers") T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (with a little help from Cyndi Lauper and Buffy the Vampire Slayer).