by Matthew Henningsen

Without Looking too Far was written to shock and to slap. It was written to forever destroy the notion that we, as Americans, live in the best of all possible worlds. Its poems tell a story, a story describing a hopeful beginning, an inevitably splintered existence, and a present and future fraught with the plagues of war, greed, and hollowness. In all, the book is to be a forceful awakening, a scream in the night, that at last smears the facade of perfection we have become accustomed to. Before we can change, we must first confront our problems, and it is this book that tells of these problems, describing them in all of their grisly reality.