The Sugar Mile

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Glyn Maxwell's last book of poems, The Nerve, was declared "one of the most enjoyable books of the year" by the New York Times Book Review. In The Sugar Mile, Maxwell returns to the extended verse narrative he so brilliantly employed in Time's Fool, to juxtapose two cities on the brink of irrevocable change. The Sugar Mile begins when the poet steps into an uptown Manhattan bar a few days before September 11, 2001. He is confronted by Joseph Stone, a barstool regular and a fellow expatriate. "What a mess the young man's made . . . with his poetry pen . . . Warm the beer, Raul, there's an English gent/on duty." It has been almost exactly sixty-one years since London's "Black Saturday," the start of the worst of the Blitz during World War II. Joe is a survivor of the bombing, and his insistent story brings his lost neighbors back to share the terror and the peculiar beauty blooming in the chaos of their last days. Raul, the bartender, interrupts to brag about New York's wonders -- as we begin to understand that the city soon will face its own catastrophic moment in history. As Stone's memories grow more hallucinatory and the bar in New York ends another day, the chance encounter of two strangers takes on the inevitability of fate.