Poetry. Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, this is the first book put out by the American Poetry Review, selected and with an introduction by Gerald Stern. Five long poems tell, among other things, my story, the bullfighter's story, Old Watermelon Hands's story, a father's story, a son's story, your story-our stories. What is certain is that the disappearance/of anything is dreadful, stuffed with anxiety./That the unbalanced life is far worse/than the good or bad lives./That the tragic and comic dreams/of falling and climbing/are more desirable than the dreams/of mirrors and puzzles (from Purple Heart Highway). Beckman's poems fall and climb, both thematically and formally. Joshua Beckman's line breaks: are the lines, sensations, account as if overlapping thrown forward as by a speaker who becomes breathless in the extension of the sentence] sometimes to minute, concentrated platelets as extension by slight disparities...-Leslie Scalapino. If you were a scientist/you would understand things differently/the m