Rag Water, by Christopher Heffernan, is a book of poetry highlighted by several pieces of flash fiction that help tell the story of our lonesome sometimes brutal path through our hopes and dreams to our loses and hard won triumphs. A book that uses at times a tough language to find the delicate balance between our everyday gutters and the further reaches of where we end as human beings and begin to see and even touch what is greater. The light of night shown through Bowery bars at three in the morning. The place where we try to find a frantic common ground in a love breaking apart in hands that only want to hold. Rag Water brings the reader to the edge of the self that most want to ignore, where we see out of the corners of the eye what is petty and selfish and lost, only to be set back on the heels of how beautiful the victory of a simple cup of coffee can be as we see that self square in the face and win it back one moment at at time.