I would like to recommend to poets and writers generally a new book, We, the Lonely People: Searching for Community by Ralph Keyes. An excellent reporter and lively writer himself, Keyes studies the effect of the breakdown of community in our mass anonymous society as it is expressed in our daily lives. He writes about the strange communities that develop among teenagers in shopping malls, lonely people in laundromats (not to speak of bars and better known places of gathering), in queues outside theaters, in encounter groups, clubs of all sorts (especially the rapidly expanding “anonymous” clubs of alcoholics, overweight people, hot lines and open line talk shows, all ways in which great intimacy is shared on the one hand while essential anonymity is retained on the other). For one thing, the book contains some important insights into the writing world itself — especially the effects of publications (and television programs) to develop a sense of family among their readers. More profoundly, however, it suggests the themes of search and yearning to which good poetry and fiction today might well be speaking.

Judson Jerome

We, the Lonely People marshals encyclopedic evidence of the pains of isolation in our people’s faces and some of their efforts, some sane and some curiously bizarre, to redress the community gap. Mr. Keyes is not very angry, possibly too accepting, but his facts are fascinating and well-documented. … I liked this book very much as a compendium of significant trends. It is written with charm, wit, and optimism.

Serious, thought-provoking, and enjoyable.

A well-written, interesting and thoroughly documented book on a somewhat worn theme of the increasingly depersonalized world, yet it does bring new insights and approaches.

Keyes identifies what is happening to us and our communities, and the examples he uses are sharp and clear. The word “community” is dropped so often in our talking that possibly it has become fuzzy in our minds. It’s good that someone such as Ralph Keyes has taken this journey and observed and written about community. All of his insights are not comfortable, but they trigger thinking — a healthy, much needed thinking.

We, the Lonely People is an exciting book about the American society of today … There is humor and pathos in the knowledgeable observations of the author and in the documented human interest discussions.

A sensitive discussion of our “loss of community” and its resulting loneliness.

Here is a profoundly moving book, full of relevant information about the ambivalence of most of us in America today who want both freedom and community and find it hard to experience them together.