When one takes an entire landscape and history inside of one’s self, one begins to feel responsible for it, and a lot of the book is taken up with Ken’s struggle with this dwarfing sense of responsibility––particularly for the various privileges and depredations of race. “Coming up, if I’d said the ‘N-word’/ my parents/––liberal, kind, pale/ as book pages, freckly, Catholic,/ love Cézanne––/ would’ve made me pray.” Ken goes on to overhear racial slurs in Georgetown and Cleveland Park, rolls through the dangerous parts of town, talks jive with other honkies, teases the seam between black majority and white fright, and contemplates how the “City Beautiful, City of White” can “hold so much time.” The cumulative result is less of an attempt to explain than simply to perceive, to document, and to palpate: the history of D.C. as an ineffable radiance, refracted through the prism of Ken’s busy mind. If Key Bridge is a map, it is a purely cognitive one, a grid of latitudes and longitudes coordinated along the axes of events and perceptions. Events transpire during the book’s composition, like the previously mentioned sniper attacks, and quickly sink beneath its bubbling surface. An entry dated “15.september.2001” reads, “I know nothing/ even about my city/ my wounded angel/ my paramour my geometry/ I’ve been so long for you/ Where am I? Where am I now?/ trying to clasp the whole/ (all of you, all of us)/ to love the broken enough[.]” There is no reconciliation, only yearning, curiosity, and the boundless love that informs Ken’s personality. If it is, at times, a love letter to the city, it is also a eulogy for the place of Ken’s origin, which, the book implies, he left without ever truly understanding. The longing that animates it is a longing to understand, and also to preserve: when a story ends without any solid conclusion, perhaps our only recourse is, to quote one entry in its entirety, to “write what’s gone.”