Winter Road - Softcover

Jenkins, Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 093010014X ISBN 13: 9780930100148

Publisher: Holy Cow! Press, 2000

Synopsis

"Louis Jenkins writes satire as elegant as Horace but with motors in it and telephones and the North Shore."—Garrison Keillor

Several of these poems are included in the performance script for NICE FISH, the play.

From the acknowledged "master" of the prose poem comes a new gathering of sixty poems. The work in The Winter Road comprises an extended meditation on the nature of memory and its influence on everyday reality. Within poems that turn whimsical, ironic, and serious, whole imaginative worlds are created and glide the reader into pleasing and unexpected territory. As when Coronado's search for gold lands him empty-handed in Kansas, Jenkins reminds us that "miracles always have a cost," and that our desire for absolute truth can sometimes lead us nowhere.

Louis Jenkins' poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, et al. and in The Best American Poetry 1999. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Old Man Winter

Old man Winter doesn't like anything. He doesn't like dogs or
cats or squirrels or birds, especially seagulls, or children or
smart-ass college students. He doesn't like loggers or environ-
mentalists or snowmobilers or skiers in their stupid lycra outfits.
He doesn't like Christmas or television. He doesn't like bureau-
crats, lawyers or pliticians. There is a thing or two he could say
to the host of the local talk-radio show but he knows for a fact
that the son-of-a-bitch does the broadcast from his condo in
Florida. He's pissed off about the OPEC oil conspiracy and the
conspiracy of gas station owners to raise prices. He doesn't like
foreigners and he doesn't like his neighbors (not that he has
many); when they finally die they just leave their junk all over
the yard. He doesn't like that. He doesn't like the look of the sky
right now, either, overcast, a kind of jaundice color. He hates
that. And that stand of spruce trees behind the house turning
black in the dusk . . . . The way it gets dark earlier every day. He
doesn't like that.

About this title

About the Author

Louis Jenkins lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His poems have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Among his books of poetry are An Anlmost Human Gesture, All Tangled Up With the Living, Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (winner of the Minnesota Book Award) and Just Above Water. He has read his poems on A Prairie Home Companion and was featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996. Two of his prose poems were published in The Best Ameriacn Poetry 1999.

Reviews

Jenkins' poems are gentler than Casey's but, because of verbal and formal choices, just as idiomatic. Hailing from Duluth, Jenkins uses the generally simple diction and syntax that Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers have popularized as normal for the region they share with him. Jenkins has read on Keillor's radio show, and his poems, like Keillor's monologues, teeter between wisdom and foolishness and between the mundane and the surreal. If banal subject matter holds Keillor's comedy down to earth, Jenkins' utterly prosaic manner keeps him from drowning in surrealism, the besetting danger of prose poetry. His prose poems on such things as "A Hill of Beans" and "Wind in the Trees" are most like Jim Heynen's lovely short-short stories about Iowa farm boys (see The One-Room School house, 1993). The prose makes his work as distinctive of a particular group as soldier talk makes Casey's. Like Casey, he can be very funny, though not as frightening. But Keillor is never as frightening as James Jones. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 093010014X
• ISBN 13: 9780930100148
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72