Richard Lemm

Imagined Truths: Myths from a Draft-Dodging Poet Richard Lemm

Richard Lemm grew up in cool 1960s Seattle, raised by alcoholic grandparents with a mad, absent mother and a mythic father who might or might not have died before he was born. To avoid the draft, he left the greatest country in the world and moved to Canada just as the Age of Aquarius was dawning. Now, having constructed a new and equally imagined identity, he uses his poet's sensibility to examine the familial myths and cultural privilege that shaped his youth -- the unsettled frontier, the golden age of the 1950s, the noble warrior, the little woman and the inexhaustible natural resources of the Pacific Northwest. This wry, poignant and insightful memoir looks at growing up in a family and country you didn't choose and coming of age in the country and with the people you did.