James T. Lawless IV is a name full of pretension but the only one ever given me so I have used it as though it were my own. I spent the bulk of my life as a journalist. I worked in New York City, then Toledo, Flint and for a long time in Cleveland. I won some recognition and wrote about anything the editors put in front of me.

Poetry has always been a higher calling and I spent a lot of my free time writing and reading it. With one sore knee almost in the grave, I am happy finally to give other people a chance to see how much or how little I was able to do. Ernest Gray, a wonderfully erudite and funny professor at the University of Toledo, once said that literature that matters is a touchstone of life. Once you read it, you are never the same. It gives you surprise, delight, fear or understanding.

I hope these poems give you one of those.