Luck

A young bartender in Boston’s North End finds himself complicit in the breakdown of his roommate’s relationship with a girlfriend; a married, middle-aged professor of composition abjectly crumbles under the stress of his affair with a beautiful student.  In his debut fiction collection, poet Ed Meek vividly reimagines a gritty, freewheeling 1970s New England whose cynical, impulsive  inhabitants—torn between the longing for human connection and the fear of domesticity—negotiate the blurry boundaries of personal responsibility. With these deceptively mundane accounts of ordinary lives in transition, Meek paints a humane, subtle portrait of ordinary people grasping at explanations for the things they do.