Customer Reviews

Buffalo Head Solos

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"...[T]here are things far worse than speaking out of turn," writes Tim Seibles in the "Open Letter" that begins his fourth full-length collection of poetry. BUFFALO HEAD SOLOS is poetry at its most urgent, fearless and necessary. Again and again he accurately names what ails us:

And still, we keep
turning from the sound

like two-legged animals all buttoned and zipped
unwilling to recognize this tall ladder of bones
to which we cling briefly with our small teeth.

And because we do not see well into the future
because we are busy taking as much as we can get because
money has infected these days with its prolific germ,

what surrounds us looks like forever
but it is not --

from "Ladder"

But Seibles isn't interested in preaching -- at least not in the deadening way we've come to think of it. He sings a wake-up call directly to our cells, summoning us back to our bodies, our voices, our imaginations:

Listen.


We belong to no nation.

One day we will hold the earth
again as if She were a love

nearly lost, Her rainy hair tangled in our hands.

from "Late Shift"

With BUFFALO HEAD SOLOS, Tim Seibles reinvents language daring and delicious enough to carry his songs. In a time when, as he writes in "Really Breathing," "evil wears some really sexy clothes," these poems burn a clear light.

Time Seibles is a master of verse, of the image and the line--this work is vintage Seibles, surprising, brilliant, yet simple--fun to read.