"The award-wining poet returns to his home place in the Pacific Northwest, where the neighborhood simmers with the chemical presence of human trouble, and sparks of beauty coexist with danger. This sound-driven, image-driven collection carries us to the lower-middle class Portland neighborhood of Lents, where Dickman was raised by a single mother. Here, as a skateboarding boy practices his kick-flip on the street, enlightenment simmers under the surface...

Explores tattoo origins, women's labor history, circus life and the stories of several women from the late 19th century through the early 20th century who covered their bodies with tattoos and traveled the country, performing nearly nude for all to see. Includes information on Irene Woodward, Nora Hildebrandt, Artoria Gibbons, Betty Broadbent, Jean Furella Carroll, Ethel Martin, Emma de Burgh and others. Also includes some modern performers

"A young writer's sincere search (with his dog) for an authentic life--buying a ruined house in Detroit for $500, fixing it up nail by nail, and, in the process, participating in the grassroots rebirth of the city itself."--Provided by publisher.

"A novel about the construction of the Panama Canal, following the intersecting lives of the local families fighting to protect their homeland, the West Indian laborers recruited to dig the waterway, and the white Americans who gained profit and glory for themselves"-- It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring...

After a bizarre accident leaves him with amnesia, a young man, Roddy Greenbank, searches for his past and the meaning of his life and strange destiny, in a story of love, hate, and bitterness set in nineteenth-century Northumberland.