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This is a terse, tough début by an award-winning American poet with punch in the language. What you find here is the grist of life - death, love, sex, departure - honed by a voice obsessed with the gravity, fear and the humour of being human. Van Winkle's understated, plain spoken, narrators are as diverse as the America they live in - the lonely night nurse, the conflicted son of a preacher, and the cross-country runner - are all ill at ease in the world. Through road kill, September 11th, and death row they address their own bitter faults with noir-like melancholy, seeking redemption and absolution.
List of contents
- My 100-Year-Old Ghost
- Thirteen
- Cassella: The Pastor's Son
- Hunter Boy & Girls at the Stream
- I Was a Fat Boy
- Tomorrow the Red Birds
- Everybody Always Talking About Jesus
- Night Nurse
- Under Hotel Sheets
- The Grave-tender
- The Water is Cold
- Gasoline
- They Will Go On
- Oregon Trail
- The Apartment
- The First Time I Touched Her
- Our Door, After a Turbulence
- Knots
- Stain
- Babel
- The Slip (pt. 2)
- Bluegrass
- The Day He Went to War
- Retrieving the Dead
- Necessary Astronomy
- The Flood
- They Tore The Bridge Down a Year Later
- Ode for a Rain from Death Row
- I Got Out When It All Went Down
- Open the Connections, She Says.
- Last Night, I Should Have Driven Straight Home
- Waiting for the Ocean
- Also, it is Lambing Season
- Unfinished Rooms
- And Table, You are Made of Wood
- Notes
About the author
Ryan Van Winkle is Reader in Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library. He runs a monthly "Literary Cabaret" called The Golden Hour and is an Editor at Forest Publications. He lives in Edinburgh but was born and spent most of his life in America. His work has appeared in New Writing Scotland, The American Poetry Review, AGNI and Northwords Now and The Oxford Poet series. He has won Salt's Crashaw Prize and been shortlisted for the Bridport and Ver Poetry Prizes.
