RONALD REAGAN RAIN is a collection of poems that explore the wildness and terror lurking beneath the surface of contemporary suburban landscapes in a largely imagined America. Images of menacing policemen, bears, fast food restaurants, and dead film stars appear as substantive figures that embody loss and a preoccupation with aging, money woes, and a failed national confidence. Influenced by Russel Edson and Georg Trakl, poets whose work is characterized by Hermeticism and Expressionism, the poems in RONALD REAGAN RAIN suggest a similar dual need for autonomy and compromise in both highly charged poetic fragments and longer prose passages that examine issues of civil and personal estrangement as the outside world calls for constant introspection and reassessments of identity.
