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- Live from the Homesick Jamboree
Molten and musical poetry from an acclaimed Southern writer
Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, "when everything was always so awash" that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her "full-to-bursting motherliness," aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or "the cockamamie lovingness" of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, "this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang."
How to Drown a Wolf
The Hospitality
The Theatre People
Ode to the Fish Fry
Origin of the Species
Weaning Electra
School of the Arts
In the Almost-Evening of Almost-Canada
Nocturne
First Fall in Maine
Live from the Homesick Jamboree
Novelette
Big Rain Day
Country Song
Semantic Relations
Poem for My Daughter August Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts
First Winter in Maine
Why the Marriage Failed
Firstborn
Morning Song
Jesus Saves
Watching The NewsHour
CV Rider
Dream in Which I Find Myself Confronted Yet Again with Why The Marriage Failed
Dear New Mothers of America
Why the Marriage Failed II
Dear Reader
Hey You
The Second Marriage
Woman by Woman
Sin City
How We Talk
The Way She Figured He Figured It
If the Universe Sends Me a Grip
The Waning
The Imperative Sentence
Now There's a River
Acknowledgments
Notes
ADRIAN BLEVINS won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha (2003), and is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (1996), and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. She teaches at Colby College.
"In long-lined, energetic poems that focus on her dysfunctional family, is angry with everyone, including herself, but still manages to have a good time. ... Lively and readable, this new work artfully captures the problems that accompany unskilled parenthood and divorce."
~Ellen Kaufman, Library Journal
""A genuine tale of sorrow and celebration, Live from the Homesick Jamboree is masterful and riveting to the last line. Replete with imagery that is not only breathtaking but unmistakably real, this collection stands as Adrian Blevins's most haunting work yet.""
~Tawnysha Green, Southern Humanities Review
""In long-lined, energetic poems that focus on her dysfunctional family, is angry with everyone, including herself, but still manages to have a good time. Lively and readable, this new work artfully captures the problems that accompany unskilled parenthood and divorce.""
~Ellen Kaufman, Library Journal
""Like Hart Crane, she forces disparate elements into the same space, crafting contradictory structures that complement a poet so desperately in love, and in hate, with her world and herself.""
~Abigail Deutsch, Poetry magazine
"This book is rich with words from every register, and they are roughed-up and sand-papered and worshipped and flung. The AC/DC-ness of them is nothing if not a mirror of what it is to live—which is awfully like what it is to love."
~Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening
"Adrian Blevins is a transcendent poet of the family in all its discontent and turbulence. Hers is a world of crush and gorge. And that gorge is deep and beautiful, but there's always a party brewing on the cliffs and dancing to be done on its crumbling edges, swords to be unsheathed, and words like stars to lasso and spin into her glittering lines.""
~Barbara Hamby, author of Babel
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