Drinking Guinness With The Dead

by Justin Hamm

"To find the poetic landscape of Justin Hamm you need to "Look off in the direction the weathervane points, past the place where rain raps sideways against the silo," and suddenly you will find yourself inside the intricate ventricles of the human heart. What a tough beautiful little book of poems and photographs [The Inheritance] is-with sublime echoes of Richard Hugo: distant houses, fallowed fields, poems of work and love, signaling the arrival of Hamm as our new clear-eyed and sublime voice of the Midwest"
- Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow
". . . some of most authentic poetry you will ever read. . . [Hamm's] imagery tugs the reader into dreamscapes that reflect, with humor and love, the cultural and actual landscapes of the Midwest."
- The Columbia Daily Tribune "Not just any blues-but that 'certain kind of blues music' Dylan refers to in liner notes for The Basement Tapes, where you 'can sit down and play it...you may have to lean forward a little.' And Hamm does just that, leans-'battered house Martin' in hand-camera in hand too-for this book includes a resonant counterpoint of black and white photographs that illuminate and extend the rust in these landscapes and their evaporating edges. These fine poems and photos are portraits 'framed in barnwood'-of willing ghosts and of a poet willing to thread his voice with theirs before that 'big dark leap into the empty'."
Dennis Hinrichsen, author of Skin Music

Genres: Poetry

164 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Originally from the flatlands of central Illinois, Justin Hamm now lives near Twain Territory in Missouri, where he works as a K-12 Librarian/Media Specialist in a small rural school district. His work, fiction or poetry, has appeared in numerous publications. Recent work has also been selected for the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize from the St. Louis Poetry Center. Justin earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2005.

Reviews

[Sabne Raznik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Justin Hamm presents us with a selection of his poems from 2007 through 2021 in this amusingly titled volume. While Hamm is strongly based in the American mid-west (he lives in Mark Twain territory), he proves himself to be a strong poet of place wherever he is writing from. Even poems that address relationships and inner child work are firmly grounded in earth and to specific locations.

"The air in this place/ is ripe/ with some kind/ of weather."- from "Ohio County, Kentucky, 1985".
"They come from the mountain, he says,/ Their faces cold as the moon's." from "Stranger at the Only Fueling Station in Kingston, Arkansas".
"a night train torches/ through the dark stomach/ of the prairie" from "A Moment in Kansas"

Hamm is a man walking the planet and keenly aware of roots, of ground, of river, of tree-sway, of time, of turning-turning-turning in outerspace at all times. He never loses sight of it. He has a connectedness to all the moving machinery of nature and reminds us that it is machinery. He raises a toast to it - to history, to place, to time, to people past and present - and passes us the pint.

[Eliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are strong, human, bone-clean, and wild underneath. Highly recommend.

[Luanne Castle · Rating 5 out of 5]

forthcoming . . . .

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb!

[Kevin Norris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A solid collection of poems from a writer that takes a look at the rural Midwest and shows you that there's much more than initially meets the eye, whether it be the ghosts in the living room watching over you late in the night, or the old men sipping their steaming coffees at Hardee's. These poems explore a variety of different themes, but for the most part, all seem to inhabit a similar shared space, one that is slower, often overlooked, and filled with remnants from the past. Even though the book samples from a wide range of Hamm's writing, the whole collection feels cohesive and like it has room to breathe. There are certain poems that will stay with you longer than others, but as a whole (at least for me), they had me looking at my home landscape in a whole new way, looking for those stories and fragments of the past that Hamm teases out so seamlessly in his poems.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every poem has blood, earth, and soul in it. And with Justin Hamm’s take on death, arguments, and panic attacks, I somehow feel less alone.