A Balancing ACT - Softcover

McGarrah, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942956541 ISBN 13: 9781942956549

Publisher: Lamar University Press, 2018

Synopsis

A Balancing Act is the fifth book of poetry by award-winning poet Jim McGarrah. With new and selected work, this book explores the cultural landscape of America, both past and present. These poems take readers on a journey through the gritty backroads of America--through a childhood fraught with beautiful tension, the experiences of a soldier in Vietnam and its aftermath, and the reflections of a man who has seen both himself and the world around him change. Part beat, part confessional, and part jazz, these poems memorize with craft, wit, and perhaps most poignant, their honesty.

About this title

Review

In this stunning collection, Jim McGarrah takes us on his personal tour of America to the persistent soundtrack of Van Morrison, Carly Simon, and Miles Davis. While we listen, Hunter S Thompson and Rilke whisper in the background creating the lovely paradox of our lives. This is backroad America, a place of beauty and sadness, of both public and private wars. This is poetry that can save our lives.

Dana Curtis - founder and managing editor of Elixir Press

From his first collection Running the Voodoo Down to the newest poems in this New and Selected Balancing Act Jim McGarrah puts his pedal to the heart of what it is to wrestle with the inevitable demons of being alive in a brutal landscape. McGarrah visits his dead - parents, fallen soldiers, supposed foreign enemies--often to stand with them again from a new distance--sometimes challenging memory and time, sometimes gratefully acknowledging the unrelenting grip of time. These are poems that speak to a life's work of personal reckoning including some of the most devastating and essential anti-war poems I've read. In the close of his sonnet "The VFW Rededicates the War Monument on the Courthouse Lawn on Memorial Day" he writes The dead, not looking on from anywhere/ and with no recall of why or where despite/their sacrifice the list grows longer, remain dead. How it is that McGarrah does all of this with such unrelenting honesty, wit, humility and formal beauty is his gift to us, his readers.

Victoria Redel - author of Before Everything, Lover Boy, and winner of the Tom and Stan Wick Poetry Prize for Already the World.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lamar University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1942956541
• ISBN 13: 9781942956549
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 188