In this Book
- Live from the Homesick Jamboree
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: Wesleyan University Press
- Series: Wesleyan Poetry Program
Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, "when everything was always so awash" that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her "full-to-bursting motherliness," aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or "the cockamamie lovingness" of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, "this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang."
Table of Contents
- The Hospitality
- p. 2
- Ode to the Fish Fry
- pp. 4-5
- Weaning Electra
- p. 7
- School of the Arts
- pp. 8-9
- First Fall in Maine
- p. 12
- Big Rain Day
- p. 15
- Country Song
- pp. 16-17
- Semantic Relations
- pp. 18-19
- Morning Song
- p. 26
- Jesus Saves
- p. 27
- Dear New Mothers of America
- pp. 31-32
- Why the Marriage Failed II
- pp. 33-34
- Dear Reader
- p. 35
- The Second Marriage
- p. 37
- How We Talk
- pp. 40-41
- The Way She Figured He Figured It
- pp. 42-43
- The Waning
- p. 45
- Now There’s a River
- p. 47
- Acknowledgments
- p. 49