American Journey, by Stephen Connely Benz

Stephen Benz’s American Journey takes the reader on a roadside spin from Florida to Texas to New Mexico to California and back east again. Benz’s poems travel by bus, car, and by way of the poet’s thumb, one eye cocked to the litter of our lives, one ear cupped to the particular cadence of our own American tongue. If Benz tracks the rough-and-tumble of the American road, he finds there is also its mitigating music, and sings that song. –Steven Haven, author of The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks and editor at Ashland Poetry Press