Sean Bishop: Sean Bishop is a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing’s Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship. He coordinates the MFA and Fellowship programs in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin.

• Foreword by Susan Mitchell — vii1Adam Before the Advent of Psychiatry — 6A Bit of Forgiveness — 7Reading Dante in the ICU — 9Adam Explains His Implications — 11Adam Home from the Wars — 13Here’s to Killing — 14Adam Relates the Last Days of Rome — 17Adam Explains the Origin — 18Red Shift — 19Adam Reports from the Distant Future — 222Black Hole Owners Association — 25Letter to Toss from the Airborne Plane — 28Secret Fellow Sufferers, [our fathers are liars.] — 30What I Asked For — 31Secret Fellow Sufferers, [once I believed if I wore my sadness] — 33On Believing the Night Has an End When the Night [...] — 34Secret Fellow Sufferers, [once more our old wounds] — 36Secret Fellow Sufferers, [have you been the unwinged thing] — 37At the Optometrist’s I Almost Remember a Story […] — 38Theory of Cruelty — 40Lake Bobby — 413TO THROW THE LITTLE BONES THAT SPEAKI. [Jack of Hearts, Jack of the weakest ventricle] — 45II. [Let’s say the heebie-jeebies are a kind of flea] — 46III. [My little hooked pickerels, just look] — 47IV. [Edge of the bright earth] — 48VI. [The last—give or take—forever I’ve spent] — 49VII. [Ladies and gents, if you look to your left] — 50VIII. [From a list of great evils I’ve chosen the best] — 51IX. [Karen you promised you’d come but didn’t] — 524Secret Fellow Sufferers, [please join me in compiling] — 55Secret Fellow Sufferers, [some of us are cured] — 56Joe Cuomo, Local Weatherman, Tests the Old Idea of Heaven — 57About to Hope — 59Secret Fellow Sufferers, [I’ve come a long way] — 60Last Supper — 61Notes Toward Basic Betterness — 64