Keith Banner's newest collection of stories and essays exposes how desire allows rural boys not to escape or ascend their lives but step beyond the need to buy into the dreams that middle class America has propagated. These are stories--some based on the realities of the author's life, some spun fiction--that offer what goes on in the hearts and minds of youths at once trapped by the demands of their Rust Belt neighborhoods and also freed by a welcome sense of being the outsider.