Review
This is a tidy collection of twenty-five poems, all finely honed and rich with the slowness of a dead afternoon. The landscape is Texas, some farms, and a town or two in Arkansas. The music is country and western on a small dark radio. The time is often the 1960s, and if not the 1960s, then it's the small town feel of the sixties, before the world got ugly. Conoley writes about family, place, and the everyday heartache of not getting enough. Her writing, in fact, is a lean version of The Last Picture Sbow, where a juke box is playing and Cokes are nursed. Loneliness begins on porchsteps and ends in seedy bars, where love is that man with his elbows on a rickety table. There is a deliberate attention to the odd graces of her characters. Conoley sums up her Aunt Alma and the homecoming queen with the three "runner-ups." Her people wear jeans and aprons, and when they dance, dust is kicked up from floorboards and there is a delightfully honest twang in Conoley's poetry. -- From Independent Publisher
