Deeds of Utmost Kindness

A travelogue that employs diverse settings and styles of poetry.

A haunting and peculiar travelogue, Deeds of the Utmost Kindness employs forms as diverse as haiku and prose poetry in settings that range from Japan to the rural Ozarks to contemporary Moscow. The compelling strangeness of the poems' precise details exposes varied rhythms of thought and illustrated how different logics work in the metaphoric structures of changing places . Yet behind the uneasy sense of dislocation felt by the constant traveler lies the personal, essentially moral, voice of the poet as observer.

FORREST GANDER is Associate Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island and author of Lynchburg (1993) and Rush to the Lake (1988).