The Wagon by Martin Preib

I greatly admire Martin Preib's writing. I enjoy the tension between his working life as a police officer and his mental life as an observer and writer.

I found out about it because a friend took a course at the Newberry Library where it, along with City on the Make by Nelson Algren, was one of the assigned texts. This book is a rumination on Preib's work as a Chicago cop, and primarily his work running the "wagon," the vehicle that is called to take dead bodies to the morgue. In Preib's writing he combines a practical account of the work of being a cop with his own emotional inner life, his relation to the city of his birth and his own unanswered questions about some of the choices he's made and places them in the larger context of our literary tradition. I think he perceives a greater need for ceremony and connection.