Littorals Ten Narrative Poems Author:James Magorian In "Littorals" James Magorian presents a hundred years of human experience - the 19th century - in the voices of Native Americans, a Shaker woman, a black slave, a landscape painter in the Catskills, a phrenologist, a Mountain Man, a Hispanic girl, a Chinese worker on the transcontinental railroad, a school teacher on the prairie, an Irish polic... more »eman in Chicago, and a classical violinist. In the tradition of Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body" and Robert Penn Warren's "Audubon, A Vision" he revives historical events with rich, inventive language, skillfully mixing ideas and images to provide a wondrous reckoning of our communal ties, demonic tendencies, the blunt routines, the mystical flashes and transcendences of the ordinary day.« less