Traveling in notions

the long version

In Traveling in Notions Michael J. Rosen creates a novel in poems, a questing contemplation, an alter ego, Gordon Penn, who holds to hopefulness amid circumstances that will have none of it. Penn is a widower, a soon-to-retire notions salesman, a midwestern family man - a man akin to Italo Calvino's optimistic Marcovaldo or a character who might inhabit a story by John Cheever or John Updike. Each poem in the collection relates an episode in Penn's ongoing confrontation with contemporary society.