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ington, D.C. In his opening statement, Pate offers no dissertation on the hows or whys of Vietnam, though, and says: "I can only write about what I know, and that is a small snapshot, taken from one camera, mine." His snapshots are vivid. "On Losing the War" still sounds familiar to those of us familiar with the Vietnam era: Vietnam was a slang war. A joke of the day war. Get high before you die war; Only the dead took it seriously. CBS knew more than we did. Kent State knew more than we did And the boys from Canada are still laughing. The Kennedys are dead. Johnson is dead. Nixon does the college circuit and Reagan thinks through his wife. We were winning when I left. Pate and many others came home to "Instant Reality ;: By tour's end I was John Wayne, or Charles Manson, depending on what side you buttered your morality. I never grieved or felt sad, (the brainwashing was effective) until I was safe in San Francisco and saw what "some hippie prophet" had written on the bathroom wall. Pate's poems are not about pretty things. He writes about death, disfigurement , fear, killing, survival, and the aftermath , as in "Vendor": My brother likes field jackets and pins with screaming eagles on them, he likes the color black, he likes books and movies about the war, he understands death, but is confused about life. As I write, my son is just back from a distant desert battlefield with "screaming eagles" on his shoulders, screaming missiles and bombers all around him, and— jrobably—screaming men. Franklin 3ate's poems, from another place, a different war, and a different era bring today's Persian Gulf conflict into my kitchen in a way I'd almost rather not know. Franklin Pate, by the way, is an active member of the American Legion, the Kentuckiana Vietnam Veterans Association , and the Military Order of the Purple Heart. —Garry Barker Siseo, Eugene. Looking In. Pikeville, Kentucky: M. F. Sohn Publications, 1990. 123 pages. Paperback. $6.95. Eugene Siseo came to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky as a boy of eight. In this collection or lighthearted essays he provides the reader with glimpses into the minds and hearts of the people of Appalachia as seen through the eyes of the child growing up among them. Siseo takes us from scenes of play with his brothers and sisters through the agony of adolescence and his first telephone call to a girl, on through his formal education, then the awakening education of the human existence. The collection as a whole gives us the warm, friendly feeling that reader and author are hanging out somewhere drinking coffee and swapping stories of childhood memories. Siseo allows the reader to share in his look back at life as we all live it—occasionally dirty and rock poor, yet often rich with the sheer delight of simple 71 pleasures such as his mother's on the day she received her new glass coffee mil Kf*r In "The Coffee Pot," Siseo tells of living for an entire summer in a handcrafted camper with no running water and a scant supply of electricity from an extension cord run from a neighbor's place sixty yards up the creek. The golden day arrives when the UPS man delivers "an all glass pot, no assembly required." Siseo shows his mother carefully rinsing the bowl with a couple of dippers of water, then refilling it with fresh water, followed by three heaping teaspoonfuls of Folger's sprinkled in the glass basket. She next meticulously fits the pieces together and turns the hot plate on high, and they all gather around to watch with breaths held tight in their throats: "Yes, that pot was ready to start making coffee. We were all gathered around, watching that pot as if it were going to talk to us. We had no T.V. that summer, so I guess the premiere of The Pot was the closest thing we could get to The Andy Griffith Show." We are later reminded of the complexities of the common ice cube when Siseo describes his method of "suck...

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