<div>Language, not geography, is where we live, says the insomniac poet at 4:00 A.M., flipping through all the different stations---grand opera, pop, and punk rock---on his radio. In the listening area that is this first collection of poems, Donald Platt tunes in the dissonances of his own and others' lives. Whatever their occasions, stopping at a roadside fruit stand in Georgia, a retarded brother learning to speak, childhood on a Midwestern farm, a grandmother's quilts, thumbing through the Gideon Bible in a cheap motel, the long algebraic equation of springtime in Virginia, these poems possess---as Mark Rudman has observed---an enviable roughness of language, which captures the abrasiveness of the world as it impinges and presses down on consciousness!</div>