Book excerpt: Poetry. "Andrew Allport's debut collection is a stunning and often heart-breaking accomplishment. From the wrenching series of elegies for his father to the more abstract and philosophical meditations on being and time, Andrew Allport makes certain we are always located in the actual and natural world. With a language both raw and elegant, with poems both dense and sublime, Andrew Allport shows us exactly how a Romantic poet writing in the 21st Century finds his way across historical and literary terrain so he might speak to us about our own troubled American moment." David St. John"