My Sixties

From the vantage point of his sixties, PJ Krass returns, in these wonderfully allusive poems, to his childhood in the 60s, that time of incense and headshops and Beatles and Stones in which both his selves, "the holy one / and the sinner," were shaped by a pop culture that zigzagged toward a "seemingly solid adult world." Then and now "a nation torn in two," this America of "disappointed dirt" still offers its muted pleasures: "Even the fortune teller's booth, / boarded up and empty, / keeps a secret of the past." That secret is almost revealed in elegiac poems tempered with humor and scored, always, with "a music strange but welcoming."