Squeezers

by Alison Pelegrin

These poems are first and foremost filled with life. We move among them in happy recognition, surrounded by all the things we love easy girls, crawfish boils, Li-Po, monster trucks. The thrill of each poem is finding out how the imagination is going to bite back this time. Catie Rosemurgy, author of My Favorite Apocalypse The Louisiana backdrops of these poems are not the moss-draped oaks and iron-festooned balconies of a thousand tourist brochures, but gritty snapshots of junkyards, junque shops, honky-tonks, trailer parks, bingo palaces, casinos, washaterias, and toxin-poisoned bayous. Through these dismal landscapes wander a surprising pair of literary French convict-poet, Fran ois Villon, feeling thoroughly at home with his fellow sinners, and Chinese scholar-poet Li-Po, drunkenly searching for his lost pastoral world. It is about time that Southern grit lit crossed over from fiction into poetry, and Alison Pelegrin is just the poet to pull it off. Julie Kane, author of Rhythm and Booze Squeezers is very convincing. It is muscular, vibrant poetry rooted in a heartbreaking landscape of Louisiana trailers and honky tonks. Poems like Prodigal and Shaggys Soul Food Open Soon, Said the Sign Outside of Tallulahs are quiet masterpieces. Lorraine Healy, author of The Archipelago

40 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2005