Modeled after Dante's Inferno, veteran journalist Thomas Flynn's Bikeman chronicles the morning of September 11, 2001 like no other published work. 

The piece, developed in the PCW, delivers a harrowing and compelling personal account of the author's experience beginning with the first strike on the World Trade Center when he decided to follow his journalist's instinct and point his bike's handlebars in the direction of the north tower. The story continues as he transitions from reporter to participant striving to survive the fall of the south tower. Flynn, as both journalist and now survivor, must come to terms with the harrowing ordeal and somehow find peace in the very act of surviving.

Part journalist's record, part survivor's eulogy, Flynn writes: 

Survival is the absence of death.

It is a subdued, a hushed existence. . .

I live to talk about it,

to relate the tale as it happens,

not only its extremities and cruelty,

but also the goodness that flourishes too.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

"What Tom has set down here are the reports of the journalist as poet, or poet as journalist. . . . These dispatches in verse tell the story of a journey into a modern underworld, and of the escape that made it possible to tell the tale."
—Dan Rather

About the Author