Cracker Sonnets

by Amy Wright

CRACKER SONNETS amalgamates the world we know (and the language we use to describe it) with the world we sense but can't quite grasp. Thus we're treated to "Granny's fried-pie," at the same time we're transported to a "moment in the kitchen, / brilliant with vermilion." Amy Wright's achievement with these brilliant poems is to "rejigger" our minds so that we can see our lives anew--with wit, truth and forgiveness--and so that we can catch glimpses of "that realm which surpasseth understanding."-David Huddle, author of BLACKSNAKE AT THE FAMILY REUNION and DREAM SENDERReaders who love wit will delight in this handbook of pop-culture Americana in verse, where each poem is more daring than the next. Most of these verses are wildly funny. Who taught us that we weren't supposed to enjoy poetry? Wright's poems un-teach dullness, crackle in the mouth like pop rocks. We readers experience the guilty pleasure of watching Wright's neighbors be themselves in all their particularity and odd, naked glory. Leda Burk, for example, "saves pajamas for hospital stays." And nature is welcome, too, to play in this verbal backwoods fest, the book offering "a long love / doing with the sea what sex does, / antennae diddling the floor." We shouldn't be watching, but of course, like Amy Wright, we're living this, too, through expertly crafted language. We become trespassers at the windows of the double-wide, but soon we forget ourselves and frolic in verbal play.-Marilyn Kallet, author of 17 books, including THE LOVE THAT MOVES ME

112 pages, Paperback

Published July 5, 2016