Whitman knew it, and Guthrie knew it, and Bill Christophersen knows it: This land is yours and mine, but only if we say so. In Two Men Fighting in a Landscape, Christophersen lays claim to a childhood with the doo-wop singers and straphangers of the Bronx, a near death escape under a landing helicopter, a breakup amidst the ruins of the World’s Fair, a handful of imagined livelihoods, a parodist’s reading of the Great Poems, and a serious and beautiful translation of the Anglo-Saxon “The Wanderer.” Then, having made all this his own, he offers it to us, our land, recognizable and right here in our hands.”
—Jordan Smith