When I Was a King

When I Was a King is dedicated to the author's wife who died in the late summer of 2019 of an undiagnosed cancer. Many of the poems deal with her unexpected death and its aftermath during a period in American life when dishonesty and brutality seemed to prevail, thus threatening such values as compassion and love of beauty that make poetry possible

While loss is the primary tone throughout this book-the loss of his beloved as well as the loss of the industrial Midwest which the author grew up in and now no longer exists-this is also a book about hope. The poems take readers through the worst darkness that life can give a person, finding a bright light shining on the other side.