John Yurechko’s collection follows his life over decades, with engaging prose and poems touched with irony and empathy.

The book starts in 1966, when the author, age 18, is working a night shift at US Steel Fairless Works Mill, sweeping the “floor of the Open-Hearth furnace,” where, as Yurechko notes in the later poem “I Cut My Head,” “My face is covered with blood/ Off to the mill’s infirmary emergency room;/ It’s two in the morning/ The nurse appears/ I wipe my eyes clean and look at her: / She’s an ancient angel/ Bent at angles,/ Squinting at my malaise/ Her fingers are shaking.”

That calm, clear, dry-eyed tone, by turns bemused, sardonic, resigned, is one of the book’s primary strengths, recounting the story without melodrama or histrionics.

From the steel mill, Yurechko graduates from Wesleyan University, earns a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s, falls in love, and begins a 30+ year career as a U.S. intelligence analyst, where, with Top Security clearance, “I experienced history; in my own very small way, I made history.”

After many years, Yurechko confronts his mortality. In a fine poem titled, “Concerning the Onset, Intensification, Confrontation, Struggle, and Subsequent Departure of My Stenosis,” he writes that, raking the leaves in his yard, “the alarm went off and I knew,/ Deep down I was in deep down trouble […] / I weakened. Knees, thighs, calves weakened/ I knew that the deep down, no chemical,/ No molecular brew would raise me back up.” Enduring a series of “Dark, electrical, neurological Frankenstein tests,” he decides, “I am an old fish, beached and helpless hopeless.”

Occasionally a poem veers into mere prose. Some offerings are a bit too cute or sentimental: “You will joyfully fill your years/ With moments from each horizon/ Bright, beautiful / Child dawns.”

Nonetheless, the book condenses a fascinating life into thoughtful, unpretentious poems and memoir fragments that poetry and memoir fans alike will appreciate.

Also available as an ebook.