Joker

by Arlo Haskell

Poetry. JOKER presents a world comfortably isolated from the sensibilities of American life. Set in Key West, Haskell's poems address end-of-the-road promise and frustration marked by dazzling sea and sky, pervasive alcoholism, and an uneasy social hierarchy of tourists, real-estate speculators, and service-industry workers. By turns candid and deceitful, maudlin and maddeningly reticent, Haskell's masked narratives are full of wry insight into the technological and political upheavals of "this lucky accidental country."

44 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 2009