A downtown Baudelaire of the '90s: that's what New York poet Mark West used to be. Now, at thirty-one, locked in a perpetual adolescence, he's slipping. Even when he takes an artist-in-residence position at a small Oregon college, he finds himself still sleeping with strange women and seeking momentary oblivion in drugs. But when he returns to Manhattan with a new book idea and renewed energy, an emotional train wreck awaits him, and he discovers that he must take his first steps into his new life alone.

Blake Nelson is an author of adult and children's literature.