A Methodist minister gone astray, a trout bum gone fishing with his father’s ashes, an artist overwhelmed by embodied beauty-these are among the uncommon heroes and exquisite narratives in this first collection of stories by the American poet and essayist, Thomas Lynch. Set in Michigan’s north woods, Ohio’s interior, on islands, in casinos and distant cities, these fictions are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, Lynch’s characters are haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements.With the elegant prose known to the readers of his earlier work, Lynch masterfully creates a world where mirage and apparition are commonplace, where people searching for safe harbour, reconnection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach.