The forms of Thomas Reiter's poems, their rhythms and language, deliver an unerring sense of history's inevitabilities, asking us to witness the bleak lives of the family captured on the photographer's plate in 1874, and the pensioned railroad carpenter's fate, and the peripeteia of the class bully, "first of us to die.". Every version of Thomas Reiter's midwest history - social, natural, economic, personal - derives its authority from the extraordinary wealth of sharply observed, sensuous, detailed imagery, which alerts even the casual reader to the significance of what these various voices, given a choral unity by the poet's art, are saying to us.

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