Reconstruction : Finishing Line Press : 9781646625680 : 1646625684 : 06 Aug 2021 : The fourth book of poetry by this New York City poet, Walter Holland's Reconstruction is a work of poetic reconciliation with his boyhood in Lynchburg, Virginia. Weaving both vivid lyric language into these short narrative poems, Holland reconstructs a flawed yet nostalgic past. Uprooted northerners, Holland, his sisters, and his parents sought the bucolic charm and unfettered economic opportunity of 1950s Virginia. But boyhood brought with it a complex emotional and psychological complicity with the perverse cultural mores and institutionalized racism of the south. White, privileged, and sexually conflicted, Holland, who was drawn to the arts, negotiated a world of natural beauty and solitary retreat. His mother struggled with depression. His father, a doctor, kept true to the stoic virtues of fifties masculinity. Middle-class and affluent, Holland went to ballroom lessons, piano lessons, lived in a