The Last Resort

The poems in The Last Resort fall thematically into four or five overlapping silos: poems about the making of poems; about time’s abrasions; about nature’s benign/malevolent indifference; about the cultural tattoos of growing up in the Mississippi Delta; about women, guilt, and love; about the inescapable separateness of the first-person pronoun. The unifying sensibility is the ‘I’ that got us in this fortunate human mess in the first place. Turned horizontally, it is a barbell that grows heavier with time, making the poems a series of psychological bench presses. In the absence of a Spotter the weight is lightened only by irony, a comic self-consciousness, and ultimately acceptance. –Jack Crocker