In his eagerly awaited poetic debut, Zachary Michael Jack takes his readers on mind-bending, mytho-poetic travels from modern-day rural Mexico to the American Great Plains of the early century and back again.

Employing an unlikely list of dramatis personae ranging from Tom Selleck to Nikita Krushchev, Jack's many-voiced story-in-poems follows his narrator's solitary stay in a Mexican mission and the heart-rending dialogue with Bird-an anthropomorphized alter-ego and trickster figure-that ensues. By turns, sad, funny, and wise, The Inanity of Music and Wings is both inimitable and delightfully uncanny-a wonderbeast of a collection part American Gothic, part Don Quixote, and wholly original.