American Loneliness

American Loneliness is peopled with the famous and the not-so-famous. It is a book tenanted by the Wright Brothers and Nettie Potter Bentley, Joseph Kennedy and James Brown and Jay Gatsby. America, as presented, bests brave women and men alike: "My mother is comfortable with fury. She accepts it. / Like she accepted the contents of the pockets of her / dead brothers, miscellanea handed her in a morgue. / She is a woman who does not defer readily to men." Roy Bentley shows us the world as a kind of Wright Flyer soaring above an Ohio field, the hoped-for miracle we let be enough for now.