With an irresistibly zany and vaudevillian energy, these poems begin in an anecdotal mode fully suited to recounting a 2,523 banjo hootenanny or a party at which the host serves 800 scrambled eggs—enough to fill a plate the size of a hot tub. That mode gains depth and resonance, turning toward the elegiac, the poignantly surreal. In one poem, the speaker alternately smears and cleans a sliding glass door until he can look through it and see the “… animals on the edges of time, performing / the rituals from which they were born.” Each of Scott Poole’s artfully colloquial poems visits the “…. places / we never thought / we could go for love / or the loss of it.”
Paulann Petersen Oregon Poet Laureate
Author of The Voluptuary, Blood-Silk, and The Wild Awake.
I’ve walked smack into a sliding glass door on more than one occasion. They look left open, or somehow you just don’t notice. They’re tricky that way. Scott Poole’s poems are like that, too: clear and wide and inviting, with a crazy fun party going on inside, then wham—you’ve smacked into something you didn’t know was there, some sorrow, or wisdom, or rearrangement of the way you see the world. So go ahead and and laugh your ass off because lots of these poems are hilarious. But be prepared to crash headfirst, too, into truths you may have overlooked and into moments of daily beauty you didn’t know where there.
Rob Carney
Author of Story Problems, Weather Report: and Boasts,Toasts, and Ghosts.
Like most of us you probably crave a world where men sit around listening to tape recordings of their deceased wives doing the dishes; a world were there are deeply disturbed fish that move slowly through cold, dark water kissing the asses of other deeply disturbed fish; a world where an old man can still destroy his whole village simply by owning an elegant billy goat. If this is you, then you have come to the right place. Scott Poole’s The Sliding Glass Door is, among other things, sometimes very strange and always very funny—it puts a reader under its immediate spell. What are you waiting for? It is time to readThe Sliding Glass Door.
Michael Earl Craig
Author of Thin Kimono; Yes, Master; and Can You Relax in My House.