Ironhood

<p><strong>This book sees all. Not everything but all. There's a difference. --John Lee Clark author of <em>How to Communicate</em></strong></p><p>In <em>Ironhood</em> the acclaimed poet Raymond Luczak recalls the neighbors and shopkeepers he once knew while growing up in Ironwood Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s. They included a scruffy man who smoked cheap cigars while tending to his fragrant backyard garden a cat-eyed woman who stood watch over a sea of typewriters a bald jeweler whose dexterous fingers repaired a watch's minuscule innards and tired cashiers in red smocks who dreamed at the western edge of town.</p><p>These poems are an antidote to the language of shallow tourist marketing and cartoonish outlander stereotypes that so often seem to define Michigan's Upper Peninsula a place much mythologized but seldom seen and understood with any clarity of vision. --M. Bartley Seigel author of <em>In the Bone-Cracking Cold</em></p><p>We meet the shops landscape and people of a working-class Iron Range town barely touched by waves of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. What emerges is an incisive exploration of growing up in a small town where one can be suffocatingly known and intimately estranged at the same time. --Emily Van Kley author of <em>The Cold and the Rust</em></p><p><strong>RAYMOND LUCZAK</strong> is the author and editor of 38 books including <em>Animals Out-There W-i-l-d</em> <em>once upon a twin</em> and <em>Compassion Michigan</em>. He lives in Minneapolis Minnesota. </p><p>From Modern History Press</p>