In These States is a partial road atlas of the contemporary U.S. soul. The poems in this book are haunted by precise and troubling questions: what, exactly is the condition of the body politic, and how does that condition affect us, both in large and small ways, in abstract and concrete symptoms, in dailiness and in eras? What is the relationship, exactly, between the individual citizen—a unique body in its own right, but also a cell, so to speak, in a greater body? The questions TR Hummer raises in these poems have no answers, but they have existential manifestations.