The Champ Is Here

Nathan Dragon's The Champ is Here is a loosely-linked collection that follows, with varying distance, an unnamed narrator, his dog and girlfriend or wife, from small American town to town. He tries on clothes in the mirror, drives by ladders hanging off bridges with his dog, surprises his "baby" with a roadtrip to Brown's Lobster Pound. When a woodpecker disappears from the narrator's yard, the stakes become existential. Even just him preparing a meal for his love for when she comes home from work can take on evolutionary implications.