DO GEESE SEE GOD

"I don't care what you've done. I don't care what happens. I only want to be with you."

Twins-orphaned as children and reunited after a separation of fourteen years, juvenile detention and alleged abuse in the New York State foster-care system-return to their hometown of Ithaca, New York, seeking vengeance and (in their minds) atonement out of love for the children they were, by the fractured adults they have become. In his fiction debut, poet and dramatist Todd Hearon assembles a troubled, and troubling, cast of characters, both complicated and compelling: the foster father, a former professional wrestler on the New York/New Jersey circuit during the sport's first "Golden Age" of television, who now makes his living as a voyeuristic pool repairman; the foster mother, a religious zealot desperately struggling to protect the children in her charge-thirty-seven to date-from the horrible fate she suspects is happening in her own home; the twins' biological parents: a young mother and adjunct professor, pining away for a life of the mind, who in the course of an unlikely adventure comes to better understand her heart; her husband, a celebrated architect, searching the frozen moments of a Central Park concert video for a shared future that exists, "if they can just get to it in time." No one escapes unscathed-and at least three don't make it out alive-in this expedition deep into the soul of love and longing, a modern mythic quest where even God "becomes too real to be believed."

Todd Hearon has received a PEN/New England "Discovery" Award, the Friends of Literature Prize (Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation), the Rumi Prize in Poetry (Arts & Letters), the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College), and the Paul Green Playwrights Prize (North Carolina Writers' Network). A Dobie-Paisano Fellow (University of Texas, Austin), he served as the Poet-in-Residence at Dartmouth College and the Frost Place. He lives and teaches in Exeter, New Hampshire.