A Box of Rain is less a songbook than a literary artifact—a window into the mind of the man who gave language to the Grateful Dead’s musical soul. Hunter, the band’s primary lyricist and one of rock’s most distinctive writers, gathered nearly three decades of work in the first printing.

For Deadheads — or anyone shaped by the late-’60s and ’70s counterculture — Far Away Radios is an emotional echo of a world that helped keep Dead’s wheels turning. Even for readers without that history, the book stands on its own as a modest, quietly haunting collection from a poet who lived hard, wrote honestly and left behind a slim volume that hums with human truth.

Steve Parish was not a star of the Grateful Dead; as a roadie, he was one of the custodians of their myth, the guy who hauled heavy crates and stayed awake long after the encore, the friend and fixer who knows the cracks in the mirror.