A genre-bending work similar to Edgar Lee Masters' A Spoon River Anthology, this "miscellany" is a portrait of a fictional New England small town over the past several hundred years, celebratory and insightful, its stories recounted by more than a hundred voices, those of the living?white, Black, Native American, male, female, gay?and of the dead, and also of inanimate objects?a neglected upright piano, a bench along a nature trail?in poems, dialogues, roadside markers, tombstones, business brochures, newspaper articles, a playlet, diary entries, oral history transcripts, a stitched sampler, and even a nursery rhyme. Some tales are of quiet happiness, others of roiling passions, moral quandaries, tragedy and comedy; above all they speak to the centrality of community and continuity in our lives.
