Jack Ruby's America

In this poem about one of modern American history's most shadowy players, David Clewell imagines the conspiracy of circumstances that for fifty years - from the childhood streets of Chicago to the dubious glamor of the Carousel Club - led up to Jack Ruby's confrontation with alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas City Jail. A roughneck whose favorite admonition to others was 'show some class,' Ruby here takes his place in the ongoing saga of growing up and growing wiser in America - of wanting nothing more or less than undeniably to belong.