Customer Reviews

Bullroarer: A Sequence (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize)

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This a first book of poems that outshines so many freshman efforts, not only for its precision and technical mastery, but also for its combination of the epic and the intimate, of historic grandeur with the minutely local. What's unusual about this collection is the poet's determination to tell a brutal, epic story--of his ancestors' hard life in the midwest--and to forego the typical young poet's daily emotional weather-report. If fierce yet delicate writers like Whitman, Wright, Levine, and Heaney are in your pantheon, you will love this book.

The real pleasure of Bullroarer is that Genoways can flat out write. He knows how tell a story, and accesses the oft-neglected power of formal effects with the light touch so necessary of formal writing at this point in American poetry. I admired the sweep and expansiveness of Bullroarer, but find myself returning to it for the way that story unfolds in such elegant, utterly American music.