Biography of a Name

Biography of a Name, a poem in free verse and prose, uses the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa as a vehicle (call it a Buick sedan with plenty of room in the trunk), to explore identity and loss in modern America. It visits Depression-era Detroit, New Jersey, football stadiums, assembly lines, jails, backyard swing sets, and gravel pits, and it listens as it drives on I-40 to country music strummed on three strands of slack barbed wire. At the end, the poem pulls up at a bar where humor and pain are drinking together, looking at their watches, waiting for the punchline.

Bill Rector is a retired physician. He is former editor of the Yale Journal of Humanities and Medicine. His autobiographical poetry book, bill, was published in 2007 by Proem Press. Biography of a Name is the third chapbook to be published in the last few months. Lost Moth, about the sudden loss of his daughter, won the Epiphany Prize in 2017. Two Worlds will appear this summer from White Knuckle Press.