Something Burned Along the Southern Border

The poems in Robert Earl Stewart’s debut collection, Something Burned Along the Southern Border, are both thoughtful and audacious. They have something to say about coyotes that go on a crime spree in the city, about how Detroit looks from across the river on a hazy day, about carnivorous insects holding clandestine bake sales, about a lonely man chopping a pineapple at dusk. They blur the line between the surreal and the everyday, reminding us that there is always something extraordinary in our ordinary lives, and if we can only learn to recognize it, we can revel in it.