The Poetry of Strangers (What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter)

From award-winning writer and poet Brian Sonia-Wallace comes this heartrending collection of literary essays that explore America’s crumbling institutions and ultimately reveal the humanity that emerges at the margins.

In this collection of thematically and geographically linked essays, Brian Sonia-Wallace—a keen observer of the human condition and a poetry evangelist—travels across the US armed with only a typewriter to write poetry for strangers as he attempts to celebrate, eulogize, and potentially restore some of the most ubiquitous staples of Americana: the transcontinental railroad, the shopping mall, and music festivals, to name just a few.

On his remarkable journey, Brian connects with fascinating American characters—those not typically covered by the mainstream media, but who instead connect with the readers of J.D. Vance, Robert Moor, and Rick Bragg. By capturing and linking these individuals and their stories through the poems Brian writes for them, Dust Bowl Nation speaks to our times and to an increasingly larger part of our populace who yearns to understand our changing cultural landscape.