The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House

Nick Lantz explores the transformative power of tragic and miraculous experiences, through these poems that illuminate near misses of tragedy and transcendence. His gaze is both roving and microscopic—the Challenger explosion, Bigfoot, a love letter written from inside a missile silo, a mother naming and re-naming a family’s short-lived pets, and a plea for post-9/11 redemption. Lantz never lets his subjects or his readers off the hook, plunging head first into worlds that are both eccentric and familiar, alarming and hopeful.

Nick Lantz is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author of We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, winner of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize. Nick Lantz is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author of We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, winner of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize.

Acknowledgments

Where You Are, Where You've Been, Where You're Going

Ship of Theseus

The Werewolf Dreams of Love

The Diving Horses

Love Letter from inside the Titan Missile Museum

The Miracle

What the Lathe Wants

U.S. Route 50, Nevada, the Loneliest Road in America

Mother's Intelligent Design

Patterson–Gimlin Film: Frame 352

History of Fire

What Land of Milk and Honey

Portmanterrorism

Misanthropy

Bride Believes Terrorists Kidnapped Missing Groom

Kuzka's Mother

A Coign of Vantage

The Cryptozoologist Chaperones His Daughter's Prom

Judith & Holofernes

The Pinch

The Marian Apparitions

The Cricket in the Basement

The Soul Diva, Past Her Prime, Visits the Holy Land

Challenger

Love Letter from Zion National Park, Utah

Back to Earth Unharmed

Collective

Battle of Alexander at Issus

Conditional

The Year We Blew Up the Whale—Florence, Oregon

Teach a Man to Fish

Trying to Cross the Border, the War Correspondent Is Jailed

The Giant Squid

Arc Welding Lesson

SETI

The Aging Sci-Fi Actor Speaks to Third Graders at the Local Planetarium

The Last Words of Pancho Villa

A Winter of Sitting by the Window