A young bartender in Boston's North End finds himself complicit in the breakdown of his roommate's relationship with a girlfriend; a married, middle-aged professor of composition abjectly crumbles under the stress of his affair with a beautiful student. In his debut fiction collection, poet Ed Meek vividly reimagines a gritty, freewheeling 1970s New England whose cynical, impulsive inhabitants--torn between the longing for human connection and the fear of domesticity--negotiate the blurry boundaries of personal responsibility. With these deceptively mundane accounts of ordinary lives in transition, Meek paints a humane, subtle portrait of ordinary people grasping at explanations for the things they do.