Adrian Blevins

Molten and musical poetry from an acclaimed Southern writer

Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, “when everything was always so awash” that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins’s work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her “full-to-bursting motherliness,” aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or “the cockamamie lovingness” of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins’s previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, “this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang.”

Endorsements:

“This book is rich with words from every register, and they are roughed-up and sand-papered and worshipped and flung. The AC/DC-ness of them is nothing if not a mirror of what it is to live—which is awfully like what it is to love.” —Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening

“Adrian Blevins is a transcendent poet of the family in all its discontent and turbulence. Hers is a world of crush and gorge. And that gorge is deep and beautiful, but there’s always a party brewing on the cliffs and dancing to be done on its crumbling edges, swords to be unsheathed, and words like stars to lasso and spin into her glittering lines.” —Barbara Hamby, author of Babel

Sex is in here. Mortality too, with all the incremental wounds to self-love and dignity that sex and mortality entail. And motherhood, square root of all the rest, is here, so stripped of every piety it steams. And spooling through this gorgeous, brassy brouhaha, the freshest poetic line that America has produced in thirty years. . . . I don’t know where she got it except from the gods and from plenty of god-inspired hard work, but Adrian Blevins’ perfect gift for timing is magic on the page . . . . [She] has harnessed the vernacular sentence—the one great underused resource in our national repository—and put it through paces that make the language young again. Edgy, double-timing, favoring the feint and swerve, she plays the momentums of slang and syntax, run-on and compression for all they’re worth. And in expert hands like these, they’re worth nearly everything: these poems remind us how smart the language can be on our behalf. We’ve needed this book; it comes not a minute too soon. Blevins’ spirited demotic is a thinking machine.” —Linda Gregerson