Lord, Bless Their Precious Names Volume One of Paperboy, A Life in Poems

As Francesco Petrarch has the “scattered rhymes” of his Songbook, so Kate Adams has those in Paperboy—but all scattered in the steady winds of one man’s long life. And as Petrarch has his Laura, so Kate Adams has her love for Leo Adler, made manifest over the course of the collection’s three volumes. Known as Mister Baker (for his home town) and Mister Oregon (for his state), he lived in the same house for nearly a century, leaving a legacy of millions to Baker City—and a mansion ready for the wrecker’s ball. He made one proposal in his life—and then proceeded to live in the ruins of that rejection. Born in the same year as baseball itself, he attended every World Series for twenty years—without a home team to cheer. This Leo watches a crystal ball shatter on his wall, here reassembled to show us a shade brought back to light as Orpheus tried to bring his Euridice. In Paperboy, con?dent of her poetic skills, Kate Adams never looks back. In Lord, Bless Their Precious Names, Paperboy’s ?rst volume, she begins the story in the eighteen-seventies with Leo’s father Karl, a German Jew who rears four children in the New World, and takes it up to the nineteen-thirties, when, after the deaths of his mother and sister, Leo retreats to his rooms downstairs, never again venturing up to the second ?oor of his own house. Faithfully following the arc of his life over the twentieth century, these lyrics slowly add up to more than mere biography, exploring the triumphs and tragedies, the loneliness and laughter, the terrible tenacity of one man’s life in images that reach out to resonate in our own.