A downtown Baudelaire of the '90s: that's what New York poet Mark West used to be. Now, at thirty-one, locked in a perpetual adolescence, he's slipping. Even when he takes an artist-in-residence position at a small Oregon college, he finds himself still sleeping with strange women and seeking momentary oblivion in drugs. But when he returns to Manhattan with a new book idea and renewed energy, an emotional train wreck awaits him, and he discovers that he must take his first steps into his new life alone.