Call Waiting

This full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward combines wry meditations on 21st-century life, work, and family with observations of America--its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well-known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees to Ward's own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book's final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 United States and its self-deceptions.