"Joseph Coulson chronicles the American family with enormous intensity. His sense of history is vast, his sense of detail fine, Coulson is the ferryman to that America just beyond—tragic and wondrous."—John Reed "In this powerful narrative, the voices of the characters draw the reader in at every stage. Coulson manages a wonderful what-next world, full of detail and event. But this is also a story of America, of cities caught in the pain and complexity of their particular moment. From the church socials of Cleveland in the thirties to the onset of the Vietnam War, this is a novel of quietly obscured lives and lovingly perceived places. It makes for wonderful reading."—Eaven Boland Told with the compression and force of a poem, The Vanishing Moon is a novel of desire, unyielding necessity, and the people and places that inevitably disappear from our lives. Opening against the backdrop of the Great -Depression, Coulson leads us on a heart-wrenching journey across two generations of an extraordinary Midwestern family. This first novel, at once epic and intimate, offers us a chorus of candid and poignant voices reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson and Carson McCullers. Joseph Coulson was born in Detroit in 1957. His full-length play, A Saloon at the Edge of the World was produced in San Francisco in 1996. He has published three books of poetry and was the recipient of a Gray Writing Fellowship, selected by Robert Creeley. His work has -appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Barnabe Mountain Review , Cemetery Dance , The Critical Survey of Poetry , and The Greenfield Review . Coulson lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Christine.