David Boles

The light that touches your face right now left the sun eight minutes ago. You have never seen the present sun. No one has. Every act of writing shares this property. The moment a word is set down, it begins traveling away from the person who wrote it.

Abandoned in Place is a work of cultural criticism that traces the pattern of institutional abandonment from the personal to the political. Beginning with the author's own childhood, the book identifies the grammar by which abandonment is disguised.

Robert was a garbage man before the system made such work obsolete. He spent decades watching what people threw away, learning the difference between what households claimed to value and what they actually discarded.

The title comes from "The Atomic Man," the seventh story in the collection, where a teenager named Calvin Reece understands what he has become. He has become light: the loneliest thing in the universe, touching everything, holding nothing. But the phrase describes all twelve protagonists.