This work speaks with the authority of lived experience combined with the tenderness of the open listening heart. Whether longing to relay an epiphany to a lost love, remembering moments shared with the dead, illuminating an incident of injustice, abandonment, violence, or pain, each poem moves in collaboration with Self, Other, Spirit, and Time. Their specificity evokes the reader's own versions of such youthful wonders as dropping acid in the Frank Mobile while reminding us of the sheer miracle of human survival. To read this collection is to take an epic American road trip with a wild array of companions. Although the stories told are often difficult to hear, they invite us to celebrate our own lives and to resist despair.

- Caroline Goodwin, author of Madrigals and Old Snow, White Sun.

Early on in Voices from the Past Peter Mladinic set down some prescriptive rules for dealing with memory and loss. In the poem "If" Mladinic tells us: "If you don't go where they are and knock / they'll go on with their lives. / Should some sight or sound remind them of you / it will be you don't care, you never loved them. / You tell yourself approaching that shore / I love, loved and will love them. They are better / left alone, going on as they have been / since the morning I set out from the mainland. / I had to. That much was clear." For my money, the poet is cataloguing Existence-as in the poem "Reciprocity" that assembly is a dialogue that begins: "If you help me get what I want I'll help / you, Ethel, one of the dead, / cold in your grave, wanting everything." The poet is saying what others are thinking, of the Spirits of the Dead: If you'll help me, I'll make you visible again. Which is what Mladinic does with small dogs and great boxers-he brings the world that is passing, and has passed to never return, into view with no small degree of reverence for the true-ish as well as the truth. Not to understate the whimsy of "Autobiography," saying: "An autobiography / of a lizard should contain the lizard's preferred / bowling team, it's preferred soup and rainforest." And so it should.

- Roy Bentley, author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, and Starlight Taxi.

Peter Mladinic's finely textured, crisply detailed poems reconstruct a past that despite or because of its individuality chimes with everyone's past. He shows us how the dust and debris stashed in the corners of our minds, the people we loved and lost in the dark, the places we passed through and forgot, remain with us, invoked in a muscular flow of syntax and living verbs.

- William Doreski, author of The Suburbs of Atlantis and Mist in Their Eyes.