Twenty years ago Nevin Sample walked into a small bank in Deep Cove, robbed a teller at gunpoint and fled into the forest of Cates Park. After a lengthy pursuit, he hid behind a stump at the edge of a small clearing. The police called to him. He raised the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Nevin had a magnetism, an understated complexity: there were those who loved him, resented him, found him gregarious. To Joe Denham, he was an old, close friend. Regeneration Machine is a 100-stanza, 9,000-word letter-in-verse to Nevin’s ghost–a requiem, elegy, lament; a sort of flailing attempt to make sense of the nonsensically violent way that a non-violent, caring, intelligent young man chose to end his life.