New Lebanon

A thrift store, a blue heron, a deceased bobcat: the poems in New Lebanon subject the upstate New York town to microscopic, idiosyncratic scrutiny.
Because its abundant cedars reminded them of the famed Biblical Lebanon, people who were steeped in Scripture gave the town its name more than 200 years ago, adding that "New" as a hope for, and acknowledgement of, the town's future.
In the same way, many of the poems here attempt to locate the town within the meeting of its past with its possibilities, a confluence like the joining of State Routes 20 and 22, which flow as one road through the center of town.