I'm a Man

The colorful characters who populate these stories live in Buffalo, but they will be readily recognizable to everyone. These are the blue collar men who never leave the neighborhood and move to the large house in the suburbs. They work in the steel mills, and when those mills close, they do whatever they can to stay afloat on the sea of anger created by the circumstances of their lives. They drink, they fight, they hang out in pool halls waiting for "something to develop." They never achieve the American Dream—in most cases, they don’t even buy into it—yet they are in the truest sense heroic. They are ordinary people stumbling through one small disaster after another.

You'll feel as if you're cruising an American Legion bar with one of the regulars.

Peter Johnson is the founding editor of the Prose Poem: An International Journal and in addition to his three books of prose poems he is the author of I'm A Man, a book of short stories also published by White Pine Press. Raised in Buffalo, NY he currently teaches at Providence College in Providence, R.I.