The first full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward, Call Waiting combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America - its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward's poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees ('Case closed. / No body was ever found') to Ward's own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book's final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 USA and its self-deceptions: 'He knew what he knew and / did not know / what he knew was / not America'.