New from Off the Grid Press: Terry Adams's Adam's Ribs
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"In Adam’s Ribs, Terry Adams makes a not-so-subtle claim to be the new American Adam. I’d say wholeheartedly that he succeeds. His voice is both gritty and dreamy, and it gets in your ear surreptitiously like the jazz he writes about so eloquently."
–Ann Neelon, author of Easter Vigil
"Terry Adams’s poems dazzle with their keen expressiveness and perfect lines. They do more than dazzle: they get inside you and stir the emotions by rendering his personal encounters with the living and the dying precisely, unsparingly, plainly, unmanipulatively."
–Phyllis Koestenbaum, author of Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies
"Poems that etch themselves into our minds by virtue of their powerful and sometimes astonishing images, their often-risky subject matter, their angled approach, their tone of contemplation and yearning."
–Chitra Divakaruni, author of Mistress of Spices
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"Terry Adams’s long-awaited debut book is a treasure trove of poems about family, motorcycles, Vietnam, the scrotum, Flash Gordon, jazz, the pink and yellow gills of a dead catfish—and just about everything under the Buckeye-and-Golden-State sun. His characters bump into one another or, more often, take leave of one another, and his narratives and incantations are charged with a wistfulness quite unique, given the current literary scene. If Adams risks sentiment, he is part of a long tradition of poets who have eschewed what could be called 'university wit.' . . . Adam’s Ribs resonates with free verse by Whitman, Bly, Dickey, James Wright—and a host of bards going back to the Old Testament patriarchs. This is one smackeroo of a book. For God’s sake, beg, borrow, or Steal it! Read it!"
—James Reiss, author of Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems
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Pietả
The son sits on the bed's edge.
Always the other is tucked in:
the mother who is going to die
that night refuses the son’s
goodnight kiss, thinking the cause
communicable. Thirty years later
the son is there again, suddenly
seeing his daughter as too beautiful
and vulnerable at fourteen
to kiss or touch in this place.The one
not kissed thinks she is bad
or he is angry, feels for no reason
she is dying, or he is dying
and won’t say.
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