Traveling in notions
Subtitle: the stories of Gordon Penn
By: poems by Michael J. Rosen.
Series: James Dickey contemporary poetry series
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Columbia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 104
Description: In Traveling in Notions Michael J. Rosen creates a novel in poems, a questing contemplation, an alter ego, Gordon Penn, who holds to hopefulness amid circumstances that will have none of it. Penn is a widower, a soon-to-retire notions salesman, a midwestern family man - a man akin to Italo Calvino's optimistic Marcovaldo or a character who might inhabit a story by John Cheever or John Updike. Each poem in the collection relates an episode in Penn's ongoing confrontation with contemporary society.