``Earthling`` is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth.
Beginning with the death of the earthling\'s mother and ending with a confrontation with his own mortality, the Poems within Earthling resist complaint or agi.
In Poems simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, James Longenbach traces the life of a modern-day earthling as he looks squarely at his little patch of earth and at the vast emptiness of interstellar space. ``Earthling`` is one of the oldest words in the English language, our original word for ploughman, a keeper of the earth