This is Ernest Yates’s nineteenth volume of poems, and the latest volume in a series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets.South Philly? South south Philly? You mean where BIG NICKS COLD CUTS competes for attention with SKINNY JOEY’S CHEESESTEAKS? Where MELROSE DINER and PENROSE DINER are real places? Where shops hunker on every corner, churches send spires above every few blocks, and rowhouses like cubbyholes line up neatly in between? Where streets are single aspha...

This is Ernest Yates’s seventeenth volume of poems, and the fourteenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets. So the city is a human habitat, a shared home. Still it’s impossible to know Philadelphia’s hundred neighborhoods; impossible as well to know their significance. What dreams, what flimsy speculations the imagination conceives?of itself and of its place?as it ponders this unknowable scene, this physical realm, this body of the city. By itse...

This is Ernest Yates’s eighteenth volume of poems, and the fifteenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets. Maybe our surroundings come into being as we experience them, as in fiction. Maybe that’s the way a city is built?the way a story unfolds in narrative, character, scene. In this poetic novella, the female narrator is a professional investigator of fraud, who is sent on a mission that involves her in fantasy?a volatile, perilous dream of the ...

This is Ernest Yates’s sixteenth volume of poems, and the thirteenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets. Looking for love? You and I will find it more surely among the fabled battlements of my far-famed city than anyplace else in this crazy world. We might need special glasses, though?the kind we wear when we go to the movies. Then as we wander bistro to bazaar we’re bound to uncover the secret corners, people and places out of which the city i...

this companion volume to Geography Lesson, Ernest Yates continues his cycle of poems based on the streets of his home town, Philadelphia. In Evening of the First Day, those streets serve as anchor to the wandering poets dreams of community and home.

This is Ernest Yates’s fourteenth volume of poems, and the eleventh volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets. In this volume the poet’s morning walk along one of Philadelphia’s main thoroughfares introduces a realm “beyond belief,” as the volume’s first poem announces. Then in poem after poem the secular city provides ground and counterpoint to the poet’s variable meditations, as the city’s impersonality drives the poet to contemplate such human valu...

This is Ernest Yates’s thirteenth volume of poems, and the tenth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through streets of Philadelphia. “Errata, you may be the eleventh,/or the thousandth, or the millionth//muse sprung up in America”?so Yates addresses his muse in the poem called “Fever.” And indeed it is Errata who leads the poet through the hundred neighborhoods of the city, from Somerton in the far northeast to Eastwick near the airport, from Chestnut Hill in the northwest...

This is Ernest Yatess ninth volume of poems, and the sixth volume in an ongoing cycle based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. Yatess turns through city streets recall the wilderness wanderings of Bash in 17th-century Japan, and especially the wanderings of the rivers and mountains poets of the Tang and pre-Tang dynasties of China. Receptive to his terrain as they were to theirs, Yates relies on syncopated rhythms, fragmentation, and abrupt rhetorical turns to capture h...

This is Ernest Yatess eleventh volume of poems and the eighth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. Yatess turns through city streets recall the wilderness wanderings of Basho in seventeenth-century Japan, especially the wanderings of the river and mountain poets of Tang and pre-Tang dynasties of China. Receptive to his terrain as they were to theirs, Yates accepts the wildness outside, merging his imagination with it so that reading these...

This is Ernest Yates’s twelfth volume of poems and the ninth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. Part Melville, part Joyce, part Bash travel diary and part Barthesian semiotics, this account of a poet’s journey through the wilderness of postindustrial Philadelphia is much, much more a search for freedom, God, love, community, and home; a meditation on the city’s and nation’s history and on the poet’s own life; a tentative definition of p...

In the poems of Geography Lesson Ernest Yates chronicles the sights and sounds of Philadelphia. In doing so, he envisions a community that accommodates the dreams of a diverse citi zenry, and suggests how the city itselfconcrete, glass, steel is built of those dreams.

This is Ernest Yatess tenth volume of poems and the seventh volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. In this volume, Yates views the city as a world of found wordswords that act as messages of desire. Billboard ads epitomize that world, but the city, as a place made by humans for the purpose of human habitation, projects our human desires through all words, even the most ordinary and common, that refer to the city. Conceived in this way, Phil...