As a passionate descrier of the systematic depopulation and aging of rural America, the poet creates pictures of the decaying towns and farms and laments their passing. He populates those towns and farms with the aging and, sometimes unwilling, citizens of the towns in which they were born and grew up. Some became loveable grotesques, some unfortunate symbols of the towns that rejected them. There is a significant amount of nostalgia here that some will call maudlin, perhaps because the emotion attached to these pictures makes them uncomfortable. There is love, hate, anger, and pity in the menagerie presented. It is worth considering.