num_pages: 104
description: The Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America.  He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura.The poems engage history in a very intimate way, revealing how a boy, as he matures, attempts to understand the world around him, his own physical development, the people in his life, and what it means to live in a country and time where it is impossible to disengage oneself from world events—where, in fact, the quest for identity is an act that requires one to rewrite history in personal terms.
language: English
title: The Improbable Swervings of Atoms
titlecomplete: The Improbable Swervings of Atoms (Pitt Poetry Series)
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 22
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press