“[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea.” —Sycamore Review A William Carlos Williams Award Finalist A Kansas City Star Top Book of the Year A Library Journal Top Winter Poetry Pick A series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, the poems collected in The City, Our City showcase the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City.” It is an unnamed, crowded place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city—past, present, and future—ring out with urgency. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to those caught up in the City’s immensity, and announce the arrival of a major new contemporary poet.