These Trespasses [Paperback]

Jim Reese (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2005

Poems about life in the midwest of the US by a gritty, Kerouac-like young poet.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jim Reese is a graduate student in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he is studying intensively with the novelist Jonis Agee. These Trespasses is his second full-length book of poetry, his first being Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham from Grizzly Press. Writing about his first book Jonis Agee says "Jim Reese comes out of the chute riding hard. This new collection is a wild romp across the hard-scrabble plains of contemporary poetry. Let 'im buck!" Raymond Hammond, Editor-in-Chief of the New York Quarterly says "Refreshingly accessible, Jim Reese's new selection of poetry, These Trespasses, manages to layer myth and meaning upon a clean, crisp Midwestern vernacular, inventive imagery and luscious sounds."

Product Details

• Paperback: 74 pages
• Publisher: The Backwaters Press (July 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976523116
• ISBN-13: 978-0976523116
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,028,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars These Trespasses, July 25, 2009

By 

Gregory B. Kosmicki "Editor, The Backwaters P... (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: These Trespasses (Paperback)

By Kevin Woster, Journal columnist
Rapid City Journal 9/30/07

...As usual, the South Dakota book festival also allowed me to make a personal discovery. This year, it was Jim Reese. When I arrived at the Deadwood Public Library Saturday at 11 a.m., there were seven people in their seats. I made eight. A woman arriving late topped off the crowd at nine. Such is the poet's life. But Reese seemed to think the turnout was fine. He's an English professor at Mount Marty College in Yankton - a non-practicing Lutheran teaching at a Catholic school, married to a Catholic wife, learning to appreciate the power of Catholic nuns. I'd guess there's a book of poems in all that, someday. But on Saturday, Reese read mainly from "These Trespasses," a jarring collection of real-life poetry that kicks like an old pump-12 gauge. As noted Nebraska poet Don Welch says in praise of the collection, "If you want poems smooth-tongued or surrealistic, don't look here." Welch is right. Rather than self-indulgent esoterica gone soft around the edges, Reese offers sharpened words about tough people and hard lives and landscapes. In a style that's rugged as washboard gravel, he introduces people like Harold Cummins, who never learned to drive because he never had anywhere worth going. He takes us to a Main Street bar where you can "in one corner listen as Harold Tahatchenbach, blinder than a coon in headlights, bends the truth," and watch as Linus Cummins prances around with antlers on his head. And he travels the lonesome byways of Cedar County, Neb. - "blasted country" populated with tough people who have been "pounding the dirt since they could first stand." People like that are worth meeting. Trips like that are worth taking.These Trespasses

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nebraska Vernacular: Should Have Been Better Than It Is, June 8, 2009

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: These Trespasses (Paperback)

In the second line of the first poem in this collection, Jim Reese compares a line of parked trucks to a used car lot. You think I'm kidding. You think a published poet would devise a more insightful, imaginative simile. But here are the opening lines of "Euchre at Two":

Picture Main Street.
Pick-ups in a row like a used car lot,
Chevy vs. rusted Ford--late November after harvest.

The story progresses into a group of old men playing cards in a local dive. Maybe the poet meant the trucks to convey some truth about the old men, but if so, it passed me by. Instead I'm faced with an author who took the noble goal of writing poetry in a working-class vernacular, and pushed it to the reductio ad absurdum of informing us that a line of parked cars is essentially similar to... a line of parked cars.

Imagine the comparisons curbside parking could elicit. Soldiers besieging a fort; a marching band on parade; graves in a churchyard; a border outsiders dare not cross. But no, the author compares a line of parked cars to a line of parked cars. Did Reese hope to attract a non-poetry-reading audience by use of banal symbols? If so, I hate to say that few Nebraska bookstores even carry poetry. If he hopes to sell, it will be to people like me with higher expectations.

Perhaps you fear I'm overly concerned with a single figure of speech. But it eats me because it's emblematic of much of this book. Reese's first full-length collection tries to capture working-class Nebraska vernacular. Which is admirable, but the result is language stuffed with incidental words that don't serve the heightened purpose of poetry. If not for the line breaks, I wouldn't know that most of these pieces weren't meant as short reflective essays or flash fiction.

Not to say all the poems pitch at this same low level. A few of them are quite good. Poems like "Ten Penny High" and "Saturday Night at the VFW" use vernacular Nebraska speech to hint at the words people don't say, truths we don't admit to ourselves. Reese's poems about Vernon and Felice are surprisingly insightful. But every time he builds up such poetic capital, he squanders it on a dud like "Welcome to the World," which I quote in full:

Willow Elizabeth.
Born February twenty-second
two thousand and four.
Six pounds, eleven ounces.
Nineteen inches long.
Beautiful blue eyes
like your mother.
Not much hair,
but lashes, by God,
that'll break a million hearts.

I wouldn't pay a buck fifty to send a friend such vague sentiments in a Hallmark card. I can't imagine an event more stirring than the birth of one's first child, and I expect a poet to express that event in language that is intensely personal, opening his heart to speak the truth about himself. Instead we get the contents of a cardboard yard sign, or a general announcement in the church bulletin.

I wanted to like this book. I wanted it to tell the truth about Nebraska life with intense, incisive language. But it aims so low that I can't imagine which readers Reese hopes to attract. I know Nebraska vernacular makes for good poetry. Twyla Hansen and Ted Kooser have used Nebraska vernacular to good effect for years. But Reese sets his standards embarrassingly low, then pats himself on the back for meeting them. This book should be better than it is.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Review Western American Literature 42.1 (2007), May 10, 2007

By 

Susan N. Maher "Chair and Professor of English" (Omaha, NE) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: These Trespasses (Paperback)

A literary renaissance across the Great Plains, bolstered by distinctive regional presses, ambitious creative writing programs, well-attended city and state-wide literary festivals, and receptive fans, makes this part of the American West particularly vital right now for American letters. Additionally, Ted Kooser's two-year appointment as Poet Laureate has helped garner national attention to the Plains and its poetic traditions. Among the new voices poised to make a significant contribution to this region's literary culture is poet Jim Reese. In his new collection, These Trespasses, Reese trains his attentive, discerning eyes and ears to those telling details of life lived in place. From the porches, dank apartments, diverse bars, and vehicles of his personae, Reese inspects surprising, clarifying moments of poignancy and honesty, trespasses into connection and forgiveness.
There is a hardness to Reese's vision that does not flinch at tragedy. His poem "13 County" declares, "This is blasted country. / Tough country" (5). In country that turns to hardpan, "it may just be the wind that's left / to echo a true family call," Reese observes (5). In "The Salesman," he witnesses a struggle between a chicken hawk and a sparrow, a portentous "dodge and push" that seems emblematic of Reese's men and women, dodging and pushing against their own demons, external and internal. Like the salesman who "blows by," Reese sees that we are all "running from time and place," waiting for "[f]ast answers [that] don't come quick" (32). Watching over his dreaming daughter in "Premeditation," Reese remembers the rape, torture, and murder of a friend, Christine. Tragedy trespasses into the pleasure of a parent's love, unsettling the surface of things, like a chicken hawk attacking a sparrow. Such moments are discomfiting, sometimes reminding us of our own complicity in sorrow. In "Homegrown," Reese recalls a summer when he worked to dismantle a falling barn for a local couple, foster parents to a boy, George. Some days George helps Reese; other days, George disappears into the house, curtains pulled, "the sound of piano keys . . . echoing in the air" (8). Later Reese reads that the foster parents were "arrested for tying / the child to his bed for days on end" (9). Not once, Reese regrets, did he stop "to ask him: is everything okay?" (9). Social contracts fray in such country and death is a permanent neighbor.
Yet Reese's poems celebrate as well, at times with a raucous humor. Reese's fondness for friends and dogs, his deep love of his wife and daughter, and his affection for misfits and eccentrics give counterweight to the grim cadence of survival. In post-modern Whitmaneque mode, his poem "Nebraska Bumper Stickers" energetically catalogues the plethora of political, personal, and commercial statements plastered to passing cars (including the sly addition of Reese's own Logan House Press motto, "Books are Heavy"). One senses the wide embrace of humanity in such poems. In the section "Ten Penny High," Reese honors the salt of the earth, poor folk living and singing the blues. Mustang Dick philosophizes, in "Backstage Pass--Interviewing Mustang Dick," "It's not the money we're after anymore. / Just one more dance / on a bright light shine" (48). Reese's people drink, eat, gamble, dance, and noodle for catfish, seizing small moments of joy from life's difficulties, making even leftovers and German bologna boiled in beer ("and throw in some onions and kraut") sound like a feast for princes ("Ring Bologna and Beer" 56).
Whitman's ghost haunts these poems (Reese even calls the Mutter Museum to discover the fate of the poet's brain), as well as Bukowski's, but perhaps Reese's biggest nods go to regional mentors, David Lee, J.V. Brummels, and William Kloefkorn. A tradition underscores his lines, but Reese's voice adds new impetus and direction. Hardpan and salt-licked country can still be fertile ground for a talented poet. Like Mustang Dick's songs, Reese's poems "just taste like more" (48). One can forgive these trespasses that bring such luminescent news of life and love.
--Susan Naramore Maher, University of Nebraska at Omaha