Overview

The poems in this book grow out and around the Hotel Vernon, built at the turn of the 20th century in Worcester, Massachusetts. Once an elegant place for local politicians to make their backdoor deals at the edge of the city, it slowly fell into decline each decade following Prohibition. Despite this, it has always been a space where artists, newspapermen and neighbors gathered at the bar or, after the late 1940s, in its Ship Room, a room purportedly modeled after the second berth of the Mayflower. In its barroom is a 1940s mural of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” painted by the owner’s son-in-law bartender and his friends, including the cartoonist, Al Capp. In these poems, oral histories are poised between and among flagrant sexuality, humor and abject poverty. Patsy Cline, Babe Ruth, WWI’s “Sacrifice Division” and Roy Orbison inhabit this space alongside the local residents: the Baker, Maurie, Charlie and Stosh. Names of neighborhood places—Rizutti’s Goodnight Café, The Nines, The Greyhound—are recited as both proof and pride in a neighborhood that was diminished through the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, cutting off foot traffic to local businesses by 1970.

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9781912561476

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Reviews

Author Information

Lea Graham is the author of the poetry collection, Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), along with three chapbooks, Spell to Spell (above/ground Press, 2018), This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Apt. 9 Press, 2016) and Calendar Girls (above/ground Press, 2006). Her poems, reviews, essays and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies that include 3Elements Review, Politics/Letters, Crab Creek Review, Bateau, Poor Yorick, Milk, The Southern Humanities Review, Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018) and The Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee, Vol. 6 (Texas Review Press, 2013). In 2018 she won the Literal Latte’ Poetry Contest.

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