Drop Zone

With this…full-length collection, that strong knife-sharp voice…draws together the stories of a woman’s confrontation with loss, betrayal, disappointment, and passion, rendered in language both plain-spoken and powerful. There is no fancy language here, no turning away from what demands to be said straight out. Whether they take as their subject the lost baby who weighed a pound and lived through the night, the neighbor whose husband has Alzheimer’s, or the lines running across the poet’s face as she stares in the mirror, these poems sting like the cold metal of the harmonica the poet runs between her lips in Music, acknowledging that she knows nothing of how to play it or any other musical instrument. What she does know is music of another kind, her own woman’s music, the pressure of one thing against another, how hollowness makes sound. –Kathryn Stripling Byer

RACING

After my father’s car
hit the wall and flipped over,
someone used to such things
must have run to the track
expecting the best,
and others must have sobbed
when they placed their hands
on his still chest.
Aunt Carry showed us the clipping
years after it happened;
we’d stopped in Spartanburg to visit,
and she gave me his birth certificate to keep.
On the way home I said,
If you live dangerously,
you can die dangerously.
Mother didn’t hear.
She was saying I never wished your father any harm.
Bur I wondered after what I heard
of nights she sat inside a car
with the motor running,
and him behind another woman’s door,
the liquor she rushed to the drain
until finally love was as thin as the sheets
she threw her suitcase on.