Poet in High Street Park is a love song to Salem, Massachusetts, by a writer who has grounded himself in the everyday realities of living in the city for the past 30 years, from playgrounds to classrooms to ballfields. It is testimony that, beneath the Halloween hoo-ha and the historical tours crowding the sidewalks, people live here. Finding the university in the local, this book asks who we are and who we want to be. --J.D. Scromgeour