The Grand Romance

Tony Baker's 'The Grand Romance' is a heartfelt collection of fiction, prose, and poetry that lifts the everyday to the grand, erasing the demarcation between big and small until only humanity remains. In text that blurs parable and storytelling, Baker uses rearview mirrors, errant felines, and plastic buckets 'filled with dirt... and good intention' to invite the reader to see the world around them more deeply. His narrator, following a condom-buying youth, quips that 'somewhere down those dark