Joker

Poetry. JOKER presents a world comfortably isolated from the sensibilities of American life. Set in Key West, Haskell's poems address end-of-the-road promise and frustration marked by dazzling sea and sky, pervasive alcoholism, and an uneasy social hierarchy of tourists, real-estate speculators, and service-industry workers. By turns candid and deceitful, maudlin and maddeningly reticent, Haskell's masked narratives are full of wry insight into the technological and political upheavals of "this lucky accidental country."