One rule of writing is that your best material tends to come from your experiences. If this isn’t true about Dominic Cicere’s Near Wild Heaven, then he’s damn good at faking it.

Cicere’s book — which contains a collection of poems, a short story and a screenplay — provides some wonderful flashes of the sort of affection that exists between a writer and what they know, especially in the short story “Split Decision,” in which a Nick Hornby-esque character named Thom struggles over whether he should break off his current relationship with a sweet school teacher. While Thom suffers from Peter Pan syndrome, like most of Hornby’s characters, Cicere teases the reader by later revealing details about the couple that add a layer of gray to the black and white proceedings. Some readers might understand Thom’s reasons for the split, if not the planned execution of its demise, which could be defined as one of the worst ways to break off a relationship. It’s this type of complexity that makes the story enjoyable, and it’s unfortunate Near Wild Heaven doesn’t have more of it.