About this item
Highlights
- This is what truly great writers - the great journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights - always do: They know their communities from the inside out, as full members, and they tell the truth about what they know.
- Author(s): Charles Entrekin
- 130 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
Book Synopsis
This is what truly great writers - the great journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights - always do: They know their communities from the inside out, as full members, and they tell the truth about what they know. This collection of poems is a memoir about Alabama that transcends but does not neglect the public ugliness, the "tired old men who've made up their minds" and set against everything "young and swift." It is a family story filled with love, tenderness and forgiveness, that rises above the noise and into the mind and soul, evoking another landscape, both of feeling and place.
Review Quotes
"Like a magic spell of memory and language, Entrekin's poetry creates existential scene after scene - his own, his family's, his suicidal first wife's - breathing and blooming out from Alabama mud. How does he do it? Rich with sensuous detail amazingly remembered, yet amazingly transparent as a lightbeam into a human soul, "because what opens at the beginning/ remains open until the end," it is one man's story in 20th century America, but it's more than that. Reading these poems feels as if I have added a whole other life to my own." - Alicia Ostriker (Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Former New York Poet Laureate) What strikes me, in particular, about Entrekin's poems is how well, and often in a surprising way, he ends poems. Time after time they open out, and everything before (already compelling) is illumined or enriched. - Sena Jeter Naslund (Author of New York Times Notable Books Ahab's Wife [1999] and Four Spirits [2003] and Former Kentucky Poet Laureate) In What Remains, poet Charles Entrekin pares his life back to a profound moral core that balances between judgment and acceptance. If there is a Zen in Americana, this is it. - Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Author of Navigating the Divide (Alan Squire Publishing, 2020) and The Hand of Buddha (Coffee House Press, 2000)