The Capital Cafe: Poems of Redneck, U.S.A. - Softcover

Louis Daniel Brodsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1877770493 ISBN 13: 9781877770494

Publisher: Time Being Books, 1993

Synopsis

The Capital Cafe is a collection of forty-eight poems, in two sections, set in a bedroom community of St. Louis and in a Missouri farm town. The poems build on each other like chapters in an engrossing novel. The first half is a slice of life observed by Moe Fischer, formerly a high-school English teacher, now a proofreader for the local newspaper, but always an eavesdropper, an oral historian, and a Jew, adrift in a belt of Baptist piety. The second section is a mosaic occurring at the "gas station turned cafe," related by rural Americans in seed caps and other regulars, such as the local car dealer, the mortician, and the Holsum Bread man, who spends his time winking furtively at the waitress (Reverend Bone's eighteen-year-old daughter).

Brodsky makes the reader understand that Redneck, U.S.A., isn't so much a specific geographic location as it is a state of being that exists in every big city and four-way-stop hamlet across the nation.

About this title

About the Author:

Brodsky is the author of fifty-five volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-three volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and seven books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University's Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

Review:

Louis Daniel Brodsky's poetry has reached new heights in The Capital Cafe, etching vivid portraits of small town Americans in middle America....Writing with controlled passion, Brodsky has mapped two Missouri towns with a lyrical intensity that transcends language, speech, giving us a holy chant, a song of people trapped in the terrible blindness that afflicts only those who will not see. In Brodsky's deft hands, that chant soars above anger and fury into a brilliant song that will echo in the heart of the reader long after the book is closed. ---- Jory Sherman, author of the Spur Award-winning The Medicine Horn

...the poems really exist all at once, portraying every nuance of a small community organically and simultaneously. Brodsky's influences are many, from the Greek poets to Swift to Faulkner. But for me, The Capital Cafe reveals small town life with the same intimacy and moral purpose as Sherwood Anderson. ---- Gregory Curtis, former editor of the 1991 National Magazine Award-winning Texas Monthly

About this edition

• Publisher: Time Being Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1877770493
• ISBN 13: 9781877770494
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 111