The award-winning poet returns to his homeplace in the Pacific Northwest, where the neighborhood simmers with the chemical presence of human trouble and sparks of beauty coexist with danger.
This image-driven, sound-driven collection carries us to the working-class Portland neighborhood of Lents, where Dickman was raised by a single mother. Here, as a skateboarding boy practices his kickflip on the street, enlightenment simmers under the surface of both the natural world and the human constructions that threaten it. The rivers shrinking to a trickle, the unaddressed crisis of homelessness, the drug use in a local park: these run side by side with the efforts and structures of families, created mostly by working mothers, with their jumbled bottomless purses and full-time jobs; Dickman’s own mother worked at the power company of the title, PP&L. His exquisite, ultrareal narratives take us down through these layers, illuminating the way we’ve treated and should treat one another, seeking integrity and understanding in the midst of a broken world.
- ISBN10 0593536495
- ISBN13 9780593536490
- Publish Date 6 February 2024
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Alfred A. Knopf
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 96
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780593536490