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Bobcat Country
Poetry. "Brandi Homan's BOBCAT COUNTRY is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday's extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the 'Fuck yeaaaah!'s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, 'poetic' resolutions. That's what makes the poems true--there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman, and yet, simultaneously, wanna sincerely rock out in a parking lot to rape rock"--Jennifer L. Knox.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
23 people want to read
About the author
Brandi Homan
8 books18 followersBrandi Homan is the author of the novel BURN FORTUNE, forthcoming from CLASH Books in May 2019. She holds a PhD in English, Creative Writing (Fiction), from the University of Denver and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of two books of poetry, Hard Reds (2008) and Bobcat Country (2010), from Shearsman Books. With her husband and daughter, she lives in the suburbs of Denver, where she thinks about the Midwest and misses drinking Yellow no. 5.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 19, 2010
Absolutely wonderful!
March 16, 2011
Last night, I lived up to one of my poetry resolutions: turn off the TV and read a book! As my fingers skimmed the spines of all those luscious books waiting for me, the orange of Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country called to me. I've had this book for a few months and have had it on my list for a year. I can't remember where I heard of it first, but I think it might have been Karen's blog, The Scrapper Poet. Wherever I first heard of it, I learned that Homan is from...wait for it...Iowa. And now I've learned that she's not only from Iowa but from Marshalltown, Iowa, a town only 60 miles southwest of my own Waterloo. I can still tell you exactly how to get there, where to by-pass Hwy 63 in favor of the less traveled 96; I can still tell you exactly what the fields of corn look like bending in the wind and whipping past at 70 mph. I can tell you how it smells on that drive in spring when the farmers are out spreading manure; smells like money, as my mom always says. In another mirroring, it also appears that we both came of age in the 80s and I'm sure we must have sat in the same gym or football stadium at some point in our high school lives at one championship game or another.
I promise I'll get to the book review, I do. However, first I have to honor my joy and amazement to know that there was another girl out there at the same time as I was, absorbing the world that I absorbed and learning to craft it into something called poetry. This might not seem remarkable to someone born and raised in NYC or SF or Seattle/Portland or even Chicago or Minneapolis, but to me it is a bit of a paradigm shift, as I often felt that I was alone in my little northeast Iowa world of words (along with my cousin, Marta Ferguson, but she was in southeast Iowa and that seemed a great distance then).
Okay, on to Bobcat Country. Those would be the Marshalltown Bobcats in the title, and the book provides a raw, funny, poignant, and sometimes difficult look at a working-class coming of age in a small Iowa town in the 80s. These are amazing poems in a voice as different from mine as I can imagine, no soft lyricism here. I am in awe of Homan's ability to paint that working-class life in such bright and unflinching tones.
Here's the opening of "Welcome to Bobcat Country," and if you're from a small town, I bet there's a sign like this at your town border on the major roadway.
We drove to the border just to say we pissed in the Mississippi
River, six in a car to see whether a Lifesaver makes a spark.
We danced in headlights.
We had sex with boyfriends at the funeral home, slept with
the gym teacher. Snuck into the hot tub at the Holiday
Inn. Watched porn at Niemeyer's and went swimming and
swimming and swimming, held each other underwater too
long.
Our mothers chain-smoked, our fathers came straight home.
Everyone spoke the same language. Everyone felt the layoffs.
I confess, Dear Reader, that while I didn't do most of these things, I knew people who did, and those last two sentences of this excerpt hit especially close to home. I actually lose my breath a little there.
As you can see from this one excerpt, Homan is a master in the details. Perhaps I rushed through this book, and I did rush, because I found my people and my places there. Boys driving T-top Camaros, summer trips to Lake Okoboji, detasseling season, Hy-Vee stores, class rings, trailer parks, Cedar Rapids & Marshalltown & Hwy 30.
But just writing about my homeland wouldn't be enough to hold me. Homan backs it up with wonderful craft and a wry, witty voice. In fact, at times she expands outward and writes about that taboo subject, the subject of poetry and being a poet. Here, her humor is at the best. In the poem "For Poets (& Others)," she tells us that we would-be poets should never use the following words "blackberries, poppies, detritus / bifurcation, sluiced, slaked" and follows the list up with this one-liner:
"James Wright has already seen horses in a field."
Oh my goodness, I couldn't stop laughing when I read that, mostly because I knew I myself had been guilty of repeating and imitating to death the Wright brothers (James & Charles, no relation to each other, or course) and so many others..
The poem that hooked me and had me starting over from the front and reading straight through to the back in a rush is actually toward the end. As I flipped through the pages trying to decide if I should read or just go to bed, I fell on this poem, which I have to quote in its entirety and I hope that Homan and her publisher will forgive me.
Iowa Poets
Attending the Writer's Workshop
does not make you an Iowa poet.
You never drove Highway 30 to Vet's
Auditorium for the Tourney--a line
of Camaros full of Busch Light and Cloves,
turquoise Geo Trackers with shoe-polished
windows. You never detasseled corn
or worked as a checker at Hy-Vee
until college, returning summers
to get schnockered playing Three Man
in someone's basement. Never showed
sheep at the state fair, saw the butter
sculptures like Tibetan monks. No
four-wheelers or grill-your-own-steak
restaurants. So, go ahead.
Write your poems about fields
and farmers and quiet, how
you can see the stars every night.
You'll never love them like I do.
I laughed and cried at this one. It touches on so many of my own themes and is so protective of Iowa. In fact, my sister was a checker at Hy-Vee and her daughter now shows pigs at the state fair, and seriously, the butter sculptures are something else!
That last line reminds me of a children's picture book that I have. It's called If You're Not from the Prairie and it's written by a man from the Canadian side of the prairie, I think. In any case, the whole book revolves around that refrain. "If you're not from the prairie, you can't know the wind" is one set of pages, "If you're not from the prairies, you can't know the sun" is another. When I'm nostalgic for home, I take this book out (and now I'll be adding Homan's to it as well).
The poem also makes me think more about regionalism and my own grad school experience in Arkansas. Several of my instructors were old-school Southern poets, strongly narrative, strongly male. They didn't know what to make of my quiet farms and fields, my lyricism. And yet, I knew I couldn't adopt a Southern voice. I couldn't become an Arkansas poet. That wasn't my story to tell.
Homan now lives in Chicago, and we have both risen from our working-class roots to something like the middle class. And while our styles might be quite different, it is a delight to find a sister voice. I praise it.
I promise I'll get to the book review, I do. However, first I have to honor my joy and amazement to know that there was another girl out there at the same time as I was, absorbing the world that I absorbed and learning to craft it into something called poetry. This might not seem remarkable to someone born and raised in NYC or SF or Seattle/Portland or even Chicago or Minneapolis, but to me it is a bit of a paradigm shift, as I often felt that I was alone in my little northeast Iowa world of words (along with my cousin, Marta Ferguson, but she was in southeast Iowa and that seemed a great distance then).
Okay, on to Bobcat Country. Those would be the Marshalltown Bobcats in the title, and the book provides a raw, funny, poignant, and sometimes difficult look at a working-class coming of age in a small Iowa town in the 80s. These are amazing poems in a voice as different from mine as I can imagine, no soft lyricism here. I am in awe of Homan's ability to paint that working-class life in such bright and unflinching tones.
Here's the opening of "Welcome to Bobcat Country," and if you're from a small town, I bet there's a sign like this at your town border on the major roadway.
We drove to the border just to say we pissed in the Mississippi
River, six in a car to see whether a Lifesaver makes a spark.
We danced in headlights.
We had sex with boyfriends at the funeral home, slept with
the gym teacher. Snuck into the hot tub at the Holiday
Inn. Watched porn at Niemeyer's and went swimming and
swimming and swimming, held each other underwater too
long.
Our mothers chain-smoked, our fathers came straight home.
Everyone spoke the same language. Everyone felt the layoffs.
I confess, Dear Reader, that while I didn't do most of these things, I knew people who did, and those last two sentences of this excerpt hit especially close to home. I actually lose my breath a little there.
As you can see from this one excerpt, Homan is a master in the details. Perhaps I rushed through this book, and I did rush, because I found my people and my places there. Boys driving T-top Camaros, summer trips to Lake Okoboji, detasseling season, Hy-Vee stores, class rings, trailer parks, Cedar Rapids & Marshalltown & Hwy 30.
But just writing about my homeland wouldn't be enough to hold me. Homan backs it up with wonderful craft and a wry, witty voice. In fact, at times she expands outward and writes about that taboo subject, the subject of poetry and being a poet. Here, her humor is at the best. In the poem "For Poets (& Others)," she tells us that we would-be poets should never use the following words "blackberries, poppies, detritus / bifurcation, sluiced, slaked" and follows the list up with this one-liner:
"James Wright has already seen horses in a field."
Oh my goodness, I couldn't stop laughing when I read that, mostly because I knew I myself had been guilty of repeating and imitating to death the Wright brothers (James & Charles, no relation to each other, or course) and so many others..
The poem that hooked me and had me starting over from the front and reading straight through to the back in a rush is actually toward the end. As I flipped through the pages trying to decide if I should read or just go to bed, I fell on this poem, which I have to quote in its entirety and I hope that Homan and her publisher will forgive me.
Iowa Poets
Attending the Writer's Workshop
does not make you an Iowa poet.
You never drove Highway 30 to Vet's
Auditorium for the Tourney--a line
of Camaros full of Busch Light and Cloves,
turquoise Geo Trackers with shoe-polished
windows. You never detasseled corn
or worked as a checker at Hy-Vee
until college, returning summers
to get schnockered playing Three Man
in someone's basement. Never showed
sheep at the state fair, saw the butter
sculptures like Tibetan monks. No
four-wheelers or grill-your-own-steak
restaurants. So, go ahead.
Write your poems about fields
and farmers and quiet, how
you can see the stars every night.
You'll never love them like I do.
I laughed and cried at this one. It touches on so many of my own themes and is so protective of Iowa. In fact, my sister was a checker at Hy-Vee and her daughter now shows pigs at the state fair, and seriously, the butter sculptures are something else!
That last line reminds me of a children's picture book that I have. It's called If You're Not from the Prairie and it's written by a man from the Canadian side of the prairie, I think. In any case, the whole book revolves around that refrain. "If you're not from the prairie, you can't know the wind" is one set of pages, "If you're not from the prairies, you can't know the sun" is another. When I'm nostalgic for home, I take this book out (and now I'll be adding Homan's to it as well).
The poem also makes me think more about regionalism and my own grad school experience in Arkansas. Several of my instructors were old-school Southern poets, strongly narrative, strongly male. They didn't know what to make of my quiet farms and fields, my lyricism. And yet, I knew I couldn't adopt a Southern voice. I couldn't become an Arkansas poet. That wasn't my story to tell.
Homan now lives in Chicago, and we have both risen from our working-class roots to something like the middle class. And while our styles might be quite different, it is a delight to find a sister voice. I praise it.
October 30, 2024
Favorite poem is the titular poem, “Bobcat Country”
January 27, 2010
Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country, made me homesick.In some ways, it's hard to explain why. The setting for many of the poems found in Bobcat Country is Iowa, not the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Still, there's something achingly familiar about many of the characters in Homan's poems. In the opening poem, "What It Means to be an American" the poet explains, "It's picnic. Buckets of beer, a bluegrass band, a shotgun/wedding. Casseroles in covered dishes, sparklers, fireflies./Doritos and french fries. cantaloupe squares and a waitress/humming in the background." Hmmmm. Substitute country music for bluegrass, and that's home to me!
Even more eerie are the lines found in "Welcome to Bobcat Country" where the poet offers such observations as "We drove to Planned Parenthood, picked wedding colors. We/listened to gangster rap in the stockroom, ate at Perkins and/Perkins and Perkins" and "We drank in the barn, the backyard, the back room, the/bedroom, the haunted house where they filmed Twister. We/had the highest teen alcoholism rate in the state." Okay, I didn't know the world of Twister, necessarily, but I knew the world of teen alcoholism -- something so common in rural areas that most people really don't think it's a problem.
So basically, Homan's book spoke to me because everything was so familiar. But I liked her use of short, terse language, her gritty details. I suppose there are those who say that Homan falls into cliché, but I disagree. Her truths are rooted in fields, in farms, in family kitchens and in the relationships women have with their friends, their sisters, their mothers, their families. She's painfully honest about the lives so many people live and the in the lives we wish we had never lived.
Not all the poems necessarily take place in Iowa. Many poems balance the poet's past with her struggle in academics -- a workingclass background with the more "intellectual" world (as someone who has a working-class background, and now works in academics, I use the term "intellectual" very loosely. Trust me). In "Mobile Homecoming" the poet explains that "I saw that others, hello Professor, viewed me/as not middle class. That I was low-middle class, or low-class/even, depending on how much cash the one doing the viewing/had." She goes on to look at her own past, to explain that "I grew up in a nice house on the good side of town/with parents who once owned a mobile home. My father shot/a rattlesnake in the driveway. He stopped it before it got to/the dogs."
Even if you are not from Iowa (or Pennsylvania) I bet you will find something familiar in Homan's world, even if you are looking for advice about navigating the poetry world.
Even more eerie are the lines found in "Welcome to Bobcat Country" where the poet offers such observations as "We drove to Planned Parenthood, picked wedding colors. We/listened to gangster rap in the stockroom, ate at Perkins and/Perkins and Perkins" and "We drank in the barn, the backyard, the back room, the/bedroom, the haunted house where they filmed Twister. We/had the highest teen alcoholism rate in the state." Okay, I didn't know the world of Twister, necessarily, but I knew the world of teen alcoholism -- something so common in rural areas that most people really don't think it's a problem.
So basically, Homan's book spoke to me because everything was so familiar. But I liked her use of short, terse language, her gritty details. I suppose there are those who say that Homan falls into cliché, but I disagree. Her truths are rooted in fields, in farms, in family kitchens and in the relationships women have with their friends, their sisters, their mothers, their families. She's painfully honest about the lives so many people live and the in the lives we wish we had never lived.
Not all the poems necessarily take place in Iowa. Many poems balance the poet's past with her struggle in academics -- a workingclass background with the more "intellectual" world (as someone who has a working-class background, and now works in academics, I use the term "intellectual" very loosely. Trust me). In "Mobile Homecoming" the poet explains that "I saw that others, hello Professor, viewed me/as not middle class. That I was low-middle class, or low-class/even, depending on how much cash the one doing the viewing/had." She goes on to look at her own past, to explain that "I grew up in a nice house on the good side of town/with parents who once owned a mobile home. My father shot/a rattlesnake in the driveway. He stopped it before it got to/the dogs."
Even if you are not from Iowa (or Pennsylvania) I bet you will find something familiar in Homan's world, even if you are looking for advice about navigating the poetry world.
May 27, 2010
I don’t know much about Brandi Homan but I am guessing that she grew up somewhere in the Carolinas (or further south) and that she wrote her first poems in a 24-hour pancake house. Bobcat Country is full of spazzy goofball charm. Even when Homan’s words ring cranky, you can tell that she secretly loves everything.
May 2, 2010
http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2...
Read, read and read again. Funny and real, a walk down memory lane, very American people, American pop culture. I just have to shake my head. Brilliant!
Read, read and read again. Funny and real, a walk down memory lane, very American people, American pop culture. I just have to shake my head. Brilliant!
February 17, 2010
YOU WILL LOVE IT
Want to Read
March 25, 2010Very excited to read this!
November 28, 2012
Mom moved..., took the oversized oak furniture. Its gloss clogs her shrunken living room (29)
her curlers green plastic spores (36)
her curlers green plastic spores (36)
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews