In Philip Bryant's new collection the urban hum of Chicago's South Side meets the pastoral beauty of small-town Minnesota life--and also its long, lonely winters. Sounds and smells from the Deep South permeate the snowbanks, and the dazzling riffs of Coltrane and Bird brighten the gray November skies.

Bryant describes the dark exhilaration of receiving, as an untested youth, his first switch-blade knife, and praises an ex-girlfriend who, in trashing his work with savage honesty, reminds him that what a poem says actually matters.

The rhythms are always musical and the playful street talk cannot disguise the fact that we're in the presence of an sober-eyed romantic who uses the cadences of the blues to summon the beauty at the core of this often harsh world we live in.