Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories

Gibbons's latest collection combines new poems and prose with selections from his previous books to create an homage to Chicago. Though he picks up where Carl Sandburg left off, both Gibbons's voice and his project are Whitmanian in scale. "From somewhere," he writes in one of the book's many odes, "a family, a village, a neighborhood, comes// The solitary singer, maybe with a guitar, who pauses with her burdens and sings, or the wayfaring man with a story that began somewhere else." Gibbons (Creatures of a Day) works best within these long, breathy lines, allowing himself to pause and wonder before resolving the thought that set him going. Unlike Whitman, Gibbons is hesitant to reach out to his subjects. At times, one wishes he would do more than pitch "his own voice... and a few coins into the cup" of the homeless he so often observes. Still, Gibbons is unafraid of asking big questions, as in the book's opening poem, in which he wonders why we "even try to list/ the kinds of places/ men and women made/ to make money." (May)