The Price of Doing Business in Mexico: And Other Poems - Softcover

Byrd, Bobby

4.38

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9780938317401: The Price of Doing Business in Mexico: And Other Poems

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0938317407 ISBN 13: 9780938317401

Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press, 1998

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Southwest Book Award Winner

Byrd’s poems open a strange door—Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene are spotted making love in downtown El Paso, a private detective goes south to Toluca to find a revolution in his heart, a sad-faced clown in Florsheim shoes lectures the poet on the mortality of his mother, and Dante and Virgil show up to explain the true meaning of North Dallas.

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From the Publisher:

Bobby Byrd has been writing poetry for nearly 40 years. He's been influenced by Black Mountain poet Paul Blackburn, who was Byrd's friend and mentor, and by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Jack Kerouac. Bobby Byrd is one of the most accessible poets writing today. His work is compassionate, tender and joyful, and firmly ground in the everyday stuff of his life.

From the Back Cover:

It's casually heroic, this poet's mode. In The Price of Doing Business in Mexico Bobby Byrd freely occupies space with Elvis, John Lennon, Esequiel Hernandez and Monette from Quality Foods-not in a "pop" way, but more "virtual." In fact they're all neighbors along some holographic stretch of that word. Byrd writes poems like a novelist. Epic ones. His lines are full of fiction, bullshit and beauty. He's an emotional writer. He is often haunted by personal tragedy, his own and anyone else's. Bad things happen in this book. Existence verges on becoming a joke-if not for a sweetness that suffuses Bobby Byrd's poems and says that a life lived, part by part, is holy. (Eileen Myles)

If you worked about fifty years, let's say, at absorbing the essences of the Border and making music out of the food, speech, good and bad habits, and sheer surreal instances of the people who live on both sides of it, you still wouldn't be Bobby Byrd, just like Pierre Menard will never be Cervantes. The thing is, Bobby Byrd is the Border Bard, and there is only one Border Bard Byrd. (Andrei Codrescu)

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