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Riceland
CL Bledsoe's collection shows us a boy's perspective on a dying farm, his dying mother, and by extraction, a dying way of life. Bledsoe paints an unsparing picture of a bleak time, but manages to leave the reader with an inexplicable hope. He tells a tale in poetry about a seismic shift in the American landscape, replete with the damage done to those on the fault lines.
136 pages, Paperback
First published November 14, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 5, 2014
For me, Riceland was a big book as far as poetry books go, but there was beauty & heartbreak throughout. And many of these working class poems about growing up really resonated with me.
"We didn't know we were worthless" Bledsoe writes in The WABAC Machine, "so we did great things." The poems about the father for me hit the hardest with lines like "He walked over to the cooler, got out a Budweiser and handed it to me, like I was finally his son." Trying to pick my favorites I come up with a chapbook's worth of poems:
My Father Spreading Mayonnaise
First Seizure
Banker's Hours
The Old Ways
But My Legs Remember that Road
Father
Relics
My Mother Making Donuts
Skin Cancer
Hunting Rabbits
Walking Through My Father's Fields, Home
Work Clothes
Portrait of My Mother 1 &2
And there are amazing lines that just surprise you like "Pig-smell hung in the air from the old man like Absolam in a tree."
"Her hair straight, smart, deep black with gray lines appearing like moonlight reflected on water."
Much more than the mantra of the beaten, these intensely personal poems of memory; of growing up in rural Arkansas do what poems should do, they make the personal universal. For when I read The Father Spreading Mayonnaise, or the Father with Skin Cancer, the Father picking pecans, I immediately see my own father, and when I read how the legs of the speaker of these poems remember the roads he has traveled, the roads of home, I remember the roads of my home as well. These are, more than just about growing up, they are about survival and escape, as well as a deep love. If you have the chance, please read Riceland, you will be the better for it.
"We didn't know we were worthless" Bledsoe writes in The WABAC Machine, "so we did great things." The poems about the father for me hit the hardest with lines like "He walked over to the cooler, got out a Budweiser and handed it to me, like I was finally his son." Trying to pick my favorites I come up with a chapbook's worth of poems:
My Father Spreading Mayonnaise
First Seizure
Banker's Hours
The Old Ways
But My Legs Remember that Road
Father
Relics
My Mother Making Donuts
Skin Cancer
Hunting Rabbits
Walking Through My Father's Fields, Home
Work Clothes
Portrait of My Mother 1 &2
And there are amazing lines that just surprise you like "Pig-smell hung in the air from the old man like Absolam in a tree."
"Her hair straight, smart, deep black with gray lines appearing like moonlight reflected on water."
Much more than the mantra of the beaten, these intensely personal poems of memory; of growing up in rural Arkansas do what poems should do, they make the personal universal. For when I read The Father Spreading Mayonnaise, or the Father with Skin Cancer, the Father picking pecans, I immediately see my own father, and when I read how the legs of the speaker of these poems remember the roads he has traveled, the roads of home, I remember the roads of my home as well. These are, more than just about growing up, they are about survival and escape, as well as a deep love. If you have the chance, please read Riceland, you will be the better for it.
July 16, 2015
Riceland is a book of poems about growing up on a dying Arkansas farm. The collection could be read as a somber coming-of-age story, where the narrator details life in rural America while working on a struggling farm and trying to come to terms with a dying mother. Both disturbing and starkly beautiful, this book will entrance any reader who opens up its pages.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews