Joe Paddock writes with great passion of the male experience--its pain, growth, and healing, and the relationships between men that often go unsung in poetry. In this powerful collection, Paddock focuses on his childhood in the rolling farmlands of Minnesota--the male elders of small town society who "lived and died so quietly that they went almost unnoticed"; the farmer who carried the "heavy hump of work with him everywhere"; the man who really did think he was Jesus; and most particularly, the author's father, who was his hero from earliest memory.