The Ascension of Sandy's Drive-In

I’ve known few poets with more energy, more of a need, line by line, metaphor by metaphor, in exploring his subjects and experiences than Rod Torreson. His subjects vary from rural, in town, family, for instance, but he also writes well about inanimate things—carved ducks, an electric fence, for instance—giving them a life of their own. I’ll recommend the book by quoting from just two poems: first, the opening lines of a poem about a storm: “The leaves on edge, clouds/with buried match heads.” And second, the opening lines of my favorite poem in the book, about a snow man: “When a snowman is built, like a man it has death/already in him.”

—David Allen Evans, author of nine collections of poems and of a poem that’s among
many others going to the moon next year in a NASA project.

Rodney Torreson’s poem “The Candling,” in his latest collection, The Ascension of Sandy’s Drive-In, illuminates the life pulsing inside an otherwise featureless egg in much the way that Torreson himself illuminates red-veined life pulsing within what many might see as the vast featureless expanse of the Midwest. For the most part, Torreson doesn’t hew to the dramatic but to the mundane, revealing what can be noteworthy, startling—even expansive—in collecting the mail, bagging groceries, packing a suitcase, strolling past a neighbor on the sidewalk. In moments that draw no attention to themselves, Rodney Torreson sees not just consequence, but blood and bone.

—Barbara Saunier, winner, The MacGuffin 16th National Poet Hunt

Rodney Torreson’s poems carry the reader deep into the Midwest where the past is visible in the present, “wheel tracks from a stagecoach, where grass never grew back,” where there is “no dawn, no sunset, but days all the same mirrored in sumptuous puddles.” The imagery and language depict a landscape teeming with flowers, trees, fields, tractors and machinery, but also people who define a life: parents, siblings, old flames and townspeople all rendered in their memorable particularity. This collection is a homage to the value of close attention to life and to the world, where “the leaves suggested in their loll as they tinkered with wind that I should live in grace and look for good.”

—Robert Haight, author of Shimmer