Ironhood

"This book sees all. Not everything, but all. There's a difference." --John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate

In Ironhood, the acclaimed poet Raymond Luczak recalls the neighbors and shopkeepers he once knew while growing up in Ironwood, Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s. They included a scruffy man who smoked cheap cigars while tending to his fragrant backyard garden, a cat-eyed woman who stood watch over a sea of typewriters, a bald jeweler whose dexterous fingers repaired a watch's minuscule innards, and tired cashiers in red smocks who dreamed at the western edge of town.

"These poems are an antidote to the language of shallow tourist marketing and cartoonish outlander stereotypes that so often seem to define Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a place much mythologized, but seldom seen and understood with any clarity of vision." --M. Bartley Seigel, author of In the Bone-Cracking Cold

"We meet the shops, landscape, and people of a working-class Iron Range town barely touched by waves of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. What emerges is an incisive exploration of growing up in a small town, where one can be suffocatingly known and intimately estranged at the same time." --Emily Van Kley, author of The Cold and the Rust

RAYMOND LUCZAK is the author and editor of 38 books, including Animals Out-There W-i-l-d, once upon a twin, and Compassion, Michigan. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.