87 North

87 North Synopsis

Poems that take the poet and the reader home, to a point of greater understanding of the past and comfort with the future.

The poems in Michael Coffey's 87 North map a complex journey-by car, by train, in spirit, in a poetics-from New York City, where he lives, to the environs of his youth in the Adirondacks, where he was raised by his adoptive parents in a town of about seven hundred people. "In this book, I try to convey both the sense of living in a metropolis teeming with the impersonal and that of being in an expanded terrain in which everything makes sense, if only because one knows it so well, and everyone knows everybody." Named for the highway that runs from the bottom to the top of New York State, 87 North begins with a surreal guidebook invoking Indians, John Ashbery, and Max Ernst while still engaging memories of a rural upbringing, and ends with a simple family recipe. Throughout, the rhythms of city life-jazz riffs, traffic, overhead street dialogue-alternate with epiphanies of the restorative power of language, memory, and experience.