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Two Towns Over
Winner of the 2017 Louise Bogan Award.
"It is not hyperbole to call Darren Demaree's Two Towns Over a game-changer. In these dazzling, risk-taking poems, Demaree drags us through the small towns of Ohio, towns ravaged by drugs: 'They are taking/ all of Ohio. It's a burial/ of the living.' This Ohio has been poisoned grotesque, and yet, thanks to this poet's empathetic eye and gallows humor, it is still beautifully redeemable. It is home: 'All fire/ & water,/ these people/ my people.'"
--Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
"It is not hyperbole to call Darren Demaree's Two Towns Over a game-changer. In these dazzling, risk-taking poems, Demaree drags us through the small towns of Ohio, towns ravaged by drugs: 'They are taking/ all of Ohio. It's a burial/ of the living.' This Ohio has been poisoned grotesque, and yet, thanks to this poet's empathetic eye and gallows humor, it is still beautifully redeemable. It is home: 'All fire/ & water,/ these people/ my people.'"
--Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
- GenresPoetry
67 pages, Paperback
Published March 22, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 9, 2018
These short sparse lines demand that we look at the opioid addiction problem in rural Ohio. There are hilarious, painful, and odd moments. The book is both fun to read and heartbreaking. It's rare to see an author deal so lightly with such a heavy issue. I was hooked from the first poem on.
"There have been so many Ohioans
eaten from the inside out
that I've been forced
to re-think exactly what these drugs
are in our world. They are wolves.
We've been raised by them."
"There have been so many Ohioans
eaten from the inside out
that I've been forced
to re-think exactly what these drugs
are in our world. They are wolves.
We've been raised by them."
August 19, 2018
A gorgeous collection.
December 23, 2020
Darren C. Demaree, in his book Two Towns Over, blesses a cursed Ohio with a populace whose touch is fighting an infection.
I know this Ohio…I know what it’s like to step over the shadow of one’s ghost…to lay low so as to give death nothing to leap from. To jump rope in hell. Demaree points to places made for map that have instead gone on to shoulder nowhere, from bunk bed to basement, looking to be housed.
Each entry, each poem, is an abruption, an angry rendering of those hypnotic recognitions that ask the present for the past and the past for the present that there may be a future locating of the hiccup lost to the moan of exile.
The title alone howls a human proximity over the work’s body to which ash is the salt of context. What is the purpose of show and tell if it is merely a prop for cause and effect, and why dream if even those in the mirage are thirsty? Answer is an act, and the writing here allows inquiry its melancholy passage through the museums of the ahistoric and positions itself as a headlight in the gut of any cyclops livestreaming the ideas dangled below the drowned. There are churches, here, and drugs. But there is no here here. Eternity has left to play the long game and most congregate as an avoidance raised on erasure.
I grew up in Ohio on what I called with my brothers a farm but what was really the shell of a farm. No animals, and noiseless machines towering above the broken and statuesque. We would joke that we were the only farm boys in Ohio who couldn’t use their hands. All jokes are serious, and no one is alone.
To hold this book, with its odes to the corners of drug houses, its sweet wolves, and its towns skipped over by sameness, is to return the clay its handmade hope. And to realize, that to be correctly dead, one must have belongings.
I know this Ohio…I know what it’s like to step over the shadow of one’s ghost…to lay low so as to give death nothing to leap from. To jump rope in hell. Demaree points to places made for map that have instead gone on to shoulder nowhere, from bunk bed to basement, looking to be housed.
Each entry, each poem, is an abruption, an angry rendering of those hypnotic recognitions that ask the present for the past and the past for the present that there may be a future locating of the hiccup lost to the moan of exile.
The title alone howls a human proximity over the work’s body to which ash is the salt of context. What is the purpose of show and tell if it is merely a prop for cause and effect, and why dream if even those in the mirage are thirsty? Answer is an act, and the writing here allows inquiry its melancholy passage through the museums of the ahistoric and positions itself as a headlight in the gut of any cyclops livestreaming the ideas dangled below the drowned. There are churches, here, and drugs. But there is no here here. Eternity has left to play the long game and most congregate as an avoidance raised on erasure.
I grew up in Ohio on what I called with my brothers a farm but what was really the shell of a farm. No animals, and noiseless machines towering above the broken and statuesque. We would joke that we were the only farm boys in Ohio who couldn’t use their hands. All jokes are serious, and no one is alone.
To hold this book, with its odes to the corners of drug houses, its sweet wolves, and its towns skipped over by sameness, is to return the clay its handmade hope. And to realize, that to be correctly dead, one must have belongings.
April 8, 2018
“Love requires/ more than meth/ & four pizza pies.”
I got to hear Darren read some of his work about a month ago, and it really affected me. His work contains a subtle power, undermining preconceptions and nailing down the heart of addiction with raw honesty and dark humor.
“The body/ count is the same/ as what it would take/ to remove the context/ of the stars in the sky.”
The cohesion of the pieces make it a quick but very moving work. Recommended.
I got to hear Darren read some of his work about a month ago, and it really affected me. His work contains a subtle power, undermining preconceptions and nailing down the heart of addiction with raw honesty and dark humor.
“The body/ count is the same/ as what it would take/ to remove the context/ of the stars in the sky.”
The cohesion of the pieces make it a quick but very moving work. Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews