Customer Reviews

Museum Crows (Salmon Poetry)

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The crow has been quite the symbolic creature through much of its existence. "Museum Crows" is the work of Ron Houchin, using his poetry to explore the crow, and what it means to humanity and the human spirit. With intriguing ideas on the matter, "Museum Crows" is a fine volume that will give poetry fans much to enjoy. "The god of pepper": A checkered cloth/makes a table all the more/a surreal painting/wherein you are hunger personified/perching on sharp elbows//Or a stage where souffles/and soups, gravies and casseroles/struggle, Italian and French characters/sweating, steaming in their own dilemmas.//Shakers and mill make it church -- /utensils of sacrifice and thurible. Beside/you, a seraph with a towel on his arm.

Crows punctuate our lives like dark exclamations. They land and watch from fence post, rooftop, and field. Their occurrence brings a form of awareness. Whether they appear as sentinels for those areas we may feel reluctance to peer into or as spectres of the unexpected, they embody the harsh and the beautiful, evoking the recurring moments of our lives. This collection, interspersed with its metaphorical black birds, looks also to summon such moments.

Ron Houchin taught in the public school system of the Appalachian region of southernmost Ohio for thirty years. Raised on the remote banks of the Ohio River in Huntington, West Virginia, he has travelled throughout Europe, Canada, and the U.S. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Southwest Review, Appalachian Heritage, The New Orleans Review, and over two hundred other venues. He has been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Grant for teachers of the arts, a tutorial fellowship to teach in a Dublin, Ireland, writing workshop, a poetry prize from Indiana University, as well as a book of the year award from the Appalachian Writers' Association. His poems have been featured on Verse Daily. This is his third collection from Salmon Poetry.