Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump

by David Bottoms

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.

Genres: Poetry

59 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[shelby · Rating 5 out of 5]

poetry is blue collar work

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, much of that from 1980 quite holds up. I especially appreciated the poems that alternated between the cemetery and the dump. Some of it does seem dated—but I liked enough of it that I’ll likely seek out some of his other work.

[Joey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't get it at first, but when I did, it was great. The poet explores so much in this work -- the animal within, living while dying, humanity. He in particular has a way of raising things from garbage and into poetry. The backwoods of Georgia, for example, become the fertile grounds from which his poetry flows. He then takes things of poetic level -- religion, for instance -- and drags them in the dirt. There's a sense of justice within Bottoms' poetry, and yet there isn't, as it acknowledges the great injustice of the world such as in the death of the grandparents' in the last movement. Readers may find themselves surging from one movement into the next, then leave this collection seeing beauty in plastic bags whirling in the wind, or carcasses of rats by the dump.