The Book of Rusty by Benjamin Drevlow, Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Well, I’m not a Jack Mormon. I’m an apostate, which is different. Seeing Benjamin Drevlow’s 2022 novel of sorts, The Book of Rusty, formatted like The Book of Mormon is fun. It is fun because…

Poems for the People by Nicole Tallman, Southern Collective Experience, 2023 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer “Not bad” says Dale Tallman, poet Nicole Tallman’s father, in the introductory blurbs to her new collection, Poems for the People. It is this spirit of fun that carries the collection forward. …

Talking to Ghosts at Parties by Rick White, Storgy, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer I’m trying to quit smoking while writing this book review. I want words to be enough, spiritual entities that, like ghosts, animate the moment. But how I crave the smoldering wreck of a well-smoked cigarette, the…

how this night the moon trails silvery light on the black, mountain-cupped water but driving home verbs fail, sensuality fails — a cold glimmer fading in waves against my skull. For Thanksgiving, I would have liked to tell my daughters what I’m thankful for: getting the piss beat out of me in the…

Don’t tell the ache anything it doesn’t already know. Your moles glow in the sky of my skull. It’s not fire after all these years. It’s luminescent rubble of our dying I climb on wires of wind, to find your smile floating the cusp of two worlds, how you’ve laid the lion and the lamb, two pewter cups full of the driest wine. Sweetheart, I sing to you: come back to me.

How could you know where the simile stops there’s a twang in the dirt, metallic footstep of the future. I can never transcend the image of brush along the irrigation ditch, how it clung in senseless visible hope, thirsty and coated with its own pollen. It was yellow then as I am jackal-yellow now, hackles pointed to winter. This town will scatter my bones beneath a new overpass someday. The blue gift you left on my stoop

Don’t break your mind on the shark-toothed slopes, Jack Kerouac can go fuck himself. Henry Miller lost a game of tic-tac-toe, that final X. Drop your dried-up sympathy in the creeks that rush like death and memory through gulches of vegetative darkness. I wish I knew these types of plants, fondled by air. My…

Half a Cigarette later I ask you how you are believing sadness revocable. Last night I dreamt a boat capsizing in a lake that became a river. Time spills us all, and I had drowned in the ghost of an old man I knew was me, oxygen tube around his nose like a bridle. The universe rides…

Splendor You’re the answer to the question in my heart when I first grew aware of the sun’s heat on my skin, saw flashes of the greenish ceilings where I was born. …