1-800-hot-ribs: Poems

by Catherine Bowman

From the turbulent landscape of the '60s and '70s, the promise of that era and America's loss of innocence, to a world where barbeque can be Fed-Exed across the country through a simple toll-free request, Bowman's first collection of poetry celebrates community and the beauty and miracles of everyday life.

Genres: Poetry

50 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry collections of all time. More people should read it, and I hope they will.

[Diann Blakely]

"I want words meat-hooked from the living steer," Lowell wrote, as if foreseeing 1-800-HOT-RIBS, the début collection by Catherine Bowman, a skilled young poet who seems to manipulate the language with a branding iron in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. Bowman's native soil is Texas, and though she casts a cold eye on its codes of Bubba Machismo and Cheerleader Femininity, she knows that denying one's roots is equivalent to using a butcher's cleaver to perform an act of self-amputation. She also knows how thin the line between Bubba and the Cheerleader really is.

In "Dove at Sundown," for example, she writes of herself and another female hunter: "We clean our kill by headlight. First you twist / the head off like a bottle cap. The thumb / and pointer finger are used as hooks / to disengage guts and any shot." Once the birds are eaten, the women "strip down and soak / in a cleaned-out cow tank swimming pool," watching bombers from a nearby Air Force base "out for test flights: slow and prehistoric, / petroglyphs of winged jaguars come to life."

"Dove at Sundown" is written in rough blank verse, and Bowman is particularly adept in the use of traditional forms. Her kinetic vernacular and jazzy rhythms, which can seem fey and unshaped in the few poems where they lack a counterbalancing tension, are perhaps most successful in sonnets like "Jackie in Cambodia" and "LBJ Ranch Barbeque" or in the several sestinas here, "Spice Night" being another of the delights Bowman's book offers.

This last poem is set in San Antonio, home of the Alamo, whose suicidal defense is accorded a special place in Texas lore. Bowman has cheerfully pillaged that lore, and our national stock of myths and archetypes as well, for 1-800-HOT-RIBS, a book whose tongue-in-cheek bravado and linguistic swagger will conquer, I predict, the hearts of many readers. Indeed, were the author and Tommy Lee Jones to have met in THE FUGITIVE's dank water tunnel, I've no doubt who would have been first to back down--not the poet. Not this one. Not this time. "My, my what a mess."


(adapted, with corrections and restorations, from PLOUGHSHARES, Spring 1994; for further reading, please see: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...)

[Leesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Spice Night" is one of my favorite poems ever and I loved the language in all of them. I'd been wanting to read a book of poetry and I read the right one. Even if this book was just "Spice Night" on every page I would've been good w/that too. This book made me wanna write more poetry. This book made me wanna write poetry on everything I see and also breathe it and live it and recite it from memory while staring @ the moon.

[dirt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A captivating collection of poems.
Spice Night was my favorite piece.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overwritten & overwrought, although "Spice Night" is great. Acrostics & other obvious exercises should have stewed a little bit more before summiting the page.

[Bev · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't tell Cathy, but there were only about two poems in this collection that did anything for me....Her style just isn't my style.

[D.A. Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this collection. Read it often.