With a voice that maintains a gritty strength balanced with poetic vision, Barry Graham pushes all his chips to the center of the table in this collection of from the gut short stories that are as sentimental as they are cynical. Set in America's underbelly-from dead-end small towns with their futile Virginity Pledges to larger than life Las Vegas with it's own brand of lust and deception-Graham populates his stories with a reoccurring cast of confused, helpless, hopeless, beautiful, dirty, optimistic, loveable down-and-outs trapped in lives and relationships they are unable to control.