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leerazer's review against another edition
3.0
Surely a contender for the most remarkable book to ever come out of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Which is not to say this dense 15,000 long-lined "poem" with no punctuation marks is very readable, in fact its a terrible challenge. I read 3,500 lines and feel that's enough for awhile. This is an hallucinatory stream of dreamtime images sometimes coalescing into an identifiable narrative for a bit before dissolving back into the torrential flood of passing language, taking their shapes from the African-American experience in Memphis and the Arkansas Delta levee-building camps of the mid twentieth century.
The work has found supporters among prominent contemporary American poets yet remains outside on the margins, too unique and unwieldy. Stanford, white and middle class but with a connection to those levee camps and Memphis neighborhoods of his youth, wrote this while at the Univ. of Arkansas as an undergraduate. It was first published in 1978, in Fayetteville, by a publisher he helped found, shortly after he killed himself.
The work has found supporters among prominent contemporary American poets yet remains outside on the margins, too unique and unwieldy. Stanford, white and middle class but with a connection to those levee camps and Memphis neighborhoods of his youth, wrote this while at the Univ. of Arkansas as an undergraduate. It was first published in 1978, in Fayetteville, by a publisher he helped found, shortly after he killed himself.
nickdelc's review against another edition
5.0
So funny and elusive. the vignettes peppered in pull you through dreamy and confusing sand pits which populate the novel, cause they are so sweet and melancholic and funny. after the incident at the drive in the poem becomes incredibly dense and hard to make an idea out of, but in its finale the journey through the desert gives so greatly, intensely smart and personal and lyrical. first poem ive ever read and i dunno should i read any more?
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