Inspired by Robert Frank’s photo-essay, The Americans—originally published in 1958 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac—this collection of story-poems and photos is intended to be a group portrait, a cross-section of life in a dense, complicated, fragmenting nation.
Together, the pictures and poems in this volume depict the great depth and passion of a people, as well as the loss and pain that haunt our time.
How to represent such a diverse, unwieldy population in a single collection? It was a crazy idea when Frank tried it. It’s even crazier today. But that is no reason not to try.
John Tessitore 