Poets’ Guide to America

What would happen if poets con­quered America? The answer to this question lies in a clever col­lection of poems that maps of the United States. Co-​​written by Pushcart Prize nom­inees John F. Buckley and Martin Ott, Poets’ Guide to America is a whim­sical intro­duction to sub­cul­tures across the country.

Buckley and Ott give us some of their rev­e­la­tions in the poem, If Poets Had Con­quered America. Had bards taken over the land:

They would have landed
on shores expanding freely with verse, each
tongue a new state, for­gotten zep­pelins
tethered to clouds. The first winter would be
the easiest, inau­gu­rated by an impromptu salon,
voices teeming with game and fresh rhymes.

The co-​​authors’ musings in this poem serve as a prelude to what you will find in the rest of the book. While free verse scales the Rocky Moun­tains and nav­i­gates the Puerto Rican desert, the poets also give a nod to tra­di­tional forms in pieces such as Pantoum in Pitts­burgh and Ghazal in Georgia. Even within the con­straints of form, Buckley and Ott manip­ulate lan­guage in comical ways and have an excep­tional knack for word play. These poems are designed to please our auditory senses–just read this pair of lines from Sestina in Seattle: Espresso rapids strew the bully base/​across palates where paddle wails of grunge.

On this unique expe­dition, Buckley and Ott hone in on highly spe­cific sets of details. Through their keen per­spective, land­marks as heavily traf­ficked as the Las Vegas strip become any­thing but cliché. They bypass the big welcome sign that thou­sands of tourists take pic­tures of, and they focus their lens on all 8,000 fish at the Mermaid Lounge. With each stop on Buckley and Ott’s itin­erary, readers get their stanza’s worth of sights and sounds.

Poets’ Guide to America gives us some­thing that the tra­di­tional text­books do not–a musi­cality of lan­guage that only poetry can achieve and the lib­erties to linger on details that get over­shadowed by the main points and big attrac­tions.     –J.M.

Buy Poets’ Guide to America locally or look online at Amazon​.com, Small Press Dis­tri­b­ution, SPD, Powell’s Books, or through an IndieBound book­store.