Call Waiting

This full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward combines wry meditations on 21st-century life, work, and family with observations of America—its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well-known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees to Ward's own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book's final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 United States and its self-deceptions.