In The Long Fault, Jay Rogoff explores how the disasters of human history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts of art and love help us to resist this damage. After opening with Cain launched into exile—"from the good book hurled / out to beget the world"—Rogoff then sweeps us along in his imaginative wanderings, pondering our mortality through the means and powers poetry makes available. The poems explore sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously enlist the

power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster and helping us proceed.

In a great variety of forms both traditional and experimental, Rogoff's poems meditate on "the long fault" into which we will all tumble. Like Hamlet staring into the eyes of Death, The Long Fault resists the encroaching dark with the imaginative sympathy, strong lyricism, and strange humor that powerful poetry can provide.

"Cain's Gift"

The blood cried up from the ground
and the air held its breath, 
the earth's sunset-stained 
face now an epitaph 
for Abel's head and hands 
thrust up from the grave, 
that childish face profiled, 
those hands clasped, a child

imagined by the sculptor 
petitioning the God 
who'd let the model murder 
play out unimpeded. 
From brother to his keeper
the singing from the sod 
rose, a sunset lark 
whose quavers left their mark

on Cain's consciousness, 
setting him aquiver 
at walking the cooling face 
of earth, banished forever
from Salisbury's Chapter House, 
a period put to his chapter, 
and from the good book hurled 
out to beget the world.