God's Bicycle

“A Chevy up on blocks is only an eyesoreto the faithless.”—from “Husks”In GOD’S BICYCLE, Joel Peckham’s fifth collection of poetry, he offers a spiritual road mix for 21st-century America. In poems that travel from the heartland through Appalachia to New England, he sings a song crafted from his own strange brew of off-kilter, irreverent psalms, prayers, hymns, aubades, and elegies in praise and homage to a fragmented but beautiful landscape and people. Drawing as much from rockabilly as Whitman, these poems are always intense and often exuberant, even in their struggle for the kind of hope that can “rise green and leafy from a bitter soil.”