Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider
It’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana.
...moreIt’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana.
...moreWe’re never satisfied with just the 30 days that April offers for National Poetry Month, so we’re keeping it going for a little while longer.
Machine Song
I Xerox what I need to keep
(a sheaf of papers, taxes, real estate),
everything that once was ours.
Otremba’s are poems of rigorous looking. In most, a speaker coolly observes a work of art, a person or animal, the poems’ tensions emerging in part from the speaker’s struggle for knowledge and connection.
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.
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