Jeff Epton

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name-calling. Epton was playful, unlike the dour Democrats we seem stuck with now, and he could often get his colleagues to laugh out loud. The political climate didn't seem all that exceptional then, but in retrospect it seems like another world.

Changes in his life took Epton away from Ann Arbor, into parenthood and a life in Washington, D.C. And now he has reemerged as a poet. In the introduction to his new book Wild Once and Captured, he writes: "Now, in my 65th year, being a poet has become a rock for me, a core piece of how I think about myself." The fact that Jeff Epton is sixty-five might be even more startling for some folks than the fact that he has become a poet.