In his imaginative memoir-in-verse, Robert Dreesen captures the stop-and-start rhythm of growing up in his family’s 24-hour truck stop and drinkin’ and dancin’ bar alongside the Pan-American Highway in northeastern Nebraska. In a life that can be described as picaresque, Kenny, Rose, and their eight kids make their way through a world rich with farmers and ranchers, writers and painters, drunks and ne’er-do-wells, horses and dogs, imagined visits from poet-sages, insufficient money (but not poverty), fights, siblings, honor, booze, and the Missouri River.