Reviews for Prairie Style

The average rating for Prairie Style based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-30 00:00:00 Fabio Ravelli PRAIRIE STYLE The direction going out--in the business past direction then and avoiding love's blunt teeth there. Done with houses and wanting to be seen as a boundary or as a line of plot re-appearing, done with all that too. Houses cleave and, to me, it all gets hammered out in overstatement-- love's a terror, a revelation cleaving to contours. Love's a terror, in town and out of town too. I was an unqualified marker, some days the ache of an implicit region. Nothing to the bear but bad hair. Having missed the trace the first time through I found coming a specificity hard to pronounce: rive of unaccented speech, a single voice to mark it all off. Well this is namelessness up here, this inward, and nothing but the curl will do. Love's over there, to me, the old terror. PRAIRIE STYLE A sexual image about the prairie ought to be a good idea: it'd have no meaning in a larger context and its existence, furiously local, might make outline itself a high level of vernacular--the image might be the sum of dire and hopeless songs, more of an after-image really. Love might be, in general, a revelation but sex could have a shape or a figure with which one could remember it; the speaker could recognize it or could himself cause recognition to occur. Love might be a terror-- the hesitation past town--but sex could be content and outline both, until the watcher (or the listener) turns away. Male, female. Black men say trim. An outline's sameness is, finally, a reference. Towns, at a distance, are that--how they appear at first, a dim cluster, and then from five or six miles off; how they look when you're only three miles away. Inbetween sightings is the prairie itself to get across: trek, trace, the trick of landscape. Love suffers its wish- fulness--it's an allegorical value and the speaker mimes allegory with descriptions of yearning, like the prairie's joke on us (among us). In- land's a name, a factory, something to say; the thing upon which the image verges, the thing push articulates. Prairie Style is a reference to Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural approach, but it is also a reference to any architecture, or property, such as the Robert Taylor homes of south Chicago, and the prairie of southern Illinois, where the poet lived for many years. A middle section is about Indianapolis, so these prairies are Midwest. The collection is a series of prose poems, reflections, sometimes lyrical, about location, language, voice, race. In his acknowledgements section he thanks Amtrak, where he wrote some of it. Railroads span geography. Music is also central, deft observation, and a wry sense of humor in places.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-26 00:00:00 Jason Summers "If you put a monster in a big town there'll be a story you can open like a book but you need the town, the monster being just old terror without it'a roaming hull, a speech balloon. You need a grid (for temptation to have come to location). I'd be the same whether I tried to get closer to love or not; I'd dawdle or I'd inch in, either way. Let love rub itself up against pleasure. You need some boulevards for the monster to cross like he was anybody coming through the camp."