Book description
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." "A genuine tale of sorrow and celebration, Live from
the Homesick Jamboree is masterful and riveting to the last line.
Replete with imagery that is not only breathtaking but unmistakably
real, this collection stands as Adrian Blevins's most haunting work
yet." --Tawnysha Green, Southern Humanities Review ADRIAN BLEVINS
won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha
(2003), and is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation
Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for
Cigarettes (1996), and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. She teaches
at Colby College.
