The Back Channels

Jennifer Houle's debut collection, The Back Channels, reflects the effort to build a meaningful life in a rapidly changing culture, in a region afflicted, as many are, with outmigration and an economy of anxiety and hard choices. Here, where memories of a more prosperous past loom large, she takes us to the backwoods where a discouraged woman walks, down to the shore beyond the fairgrounds, and into the parking lots where smokers gather to talk about layoffs or pay cuts. Houle's poems invit...