The poems in The End of America, Book Three act like lightning rods for the many types of experience, cultural and political and personal, that make up life in southern California. The poems' jagged structures reveal the ways that different kinds of information collide. Both resident and stranger, the narrator sees, with an outsider's fresh eye, the forces large scale and small that affect him and others in the small coastal town, Carlsbad, where he has come to live.
The End of America is a long, multi-book work, pieces from which have been appearing in various literary magazines and small books and chapbooks over the last decade. Each book makes a different use of poetic forms to explore the cultural and political conditions of life in southern California and its connection to the rest of California and beyond.

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of a number of books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His most recent novel, Crab, was published in 2017 by Submodern Books. Other recent publications include a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy, and a novel, The Quarry and The Lot. Temporary Worker Rides a Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism.