This collection of poems by New England-born NYC writer and actor David Lawton is an inspired page-turner, full of can’t miss elegies, homages and snapshots, and a hell of an education in the author’s rootedness in the accomplishments and frustrations of actors, musicians, poets and artists whose brushes with fame were as real and as raw as our own anonymous struggles in life.

There’s plenty of bad faith and gospel truth between these covers, a mixology of sourmash whiskey, bennies and blind luck, stirred by the capricious hand of fate. The reader is greeted by a revel of all the twists and turns of all the rest that flesh is heir to

There’s plenty of name-dropping in this collection, but it is all earned, and if the most famous in the crowd get a reprise, we are glad of it and it is well deserved.

As for those who didn’t quite make the limelight – those who got slapped in the face, those who took it in the shorts, or those who just missed the fame-train as it was pulling out of the station — it is for them that Lawton offers his tenderest attention, offering the unsung and the unfairly ignored another chance, through his word-magic, to step up to the bright lights and take their bows.