The Hollow Log Lounge: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series)

"This is no fairy tale. / It's all fantastic and bizarre and true. / It's my life, a raspy song, that sounds better if you sing along."

The men and women who live and work near Opelika, Alabama, gather at the Hollow Log Lounge. There, under the watchful eye of the stuffed fox behind the bar, they unload their gripes and worries, tell their stories, argue, joke, commune, complain, and confess.

In this collection of poems, R. T. Smith paints a vividly imagined portrait of the community in this small-town bar, capturing the chorus of the patrons' voices echoing off the knotted wood-paneled walls. Smith's stand-in, Sam Buckhannon, scribbles stories heard and overheard as tongues loosened by liquor spin out monologues in which southern idiom and vernacular seem perfectly at home within the constraints of measured verse.