<p>"Because I did not die in the log cabin where I was born, I shoulder the Green Mountains wherever I go...." -"A Meditation on FireIn Gunmetal Blue, Jason Allen tracks the journey from the Green Mountains of his birth to his present life, passing through years of family strife, addictions, and misunderstandings to the place of love and peace that he calls today. The poetry in these pages does not shy away from the unpleasant nor does it ignore the beauty of the moments that have passed as he has grown from "the dirt-poor little shit who stumbled / into smart-kid classes in hand-me-down / sneakers and odd-fitting pants" to a man who vows to "fall for all the fictions / with happy endings." In between his words show why he is a courageous new voice in poetry.</p>

Gunmetal Blue

Literature & Fiction

Allen, Jason

Poetry

Jane's Boy Press

<p>"Attentive as hell, Eric Parkison's poems with their crunchy, original music of consonant and vowel, show us a vivid reality. Here, in convincing detail, is country life: the natural world and human ways of dealing with it: the wood stove with its cleanout panel; the harshly efficient cider press and its hard-won sweetness; an unforgettable hand-cranked machine for sorting the grades and sizes of potatoes. A genuine poetry-the real thing-makes this unsentimental world of work, ruination and survival into a leaping-goat celebration of clarity." -Robert Pinsky"Eric Parkison's No Arcadia takes conscious aim at the world of pastoralism and harmony with nature, offering instead a vision of a "shorn landscape" that is true to post-industrial America, a landscape populated by poisonous hogweed, polluted creeks and junked cars. This chapbook acknowledges the ugliness of such a world: "there's no way to master such a broken thing," one poem says, while another realizes, "The people before us / Knew not to want more than you can have," and a third concludes, "Our luck is a dear thing.""And yet, like the apple sugar tasted by an ex-Marine during cider-making, there is much sweetness, too, in these keenly observed poems. One of them is entitled "Asymptote," after a figure in analytic geometry: and here, indeed, the curve of feeling approaches but never quite touches the straight line of reality. This not-quite-touching is the saving grace of a collection in which feeling and reality are held in an infinite relationship. "You try now to love those things," Parkison says, "that waste can only slowly undo."-Karl Kirchwey</p>

NO ARCADIA

Parkison, D. Eric

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Books by Jane's Boy Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Jane's Boy Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gunmetal Blue

NO ARCADIA