The poetry in Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham is blue collar — unflinching and unapologetic. With a photographer's eye and clear vision, Reese reaches straight for the place that has always kept the working class honest — the heart...
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Editorial Reviews
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Reese comes out riding hard. This new collection is a wild romp across the hard-scrabble plains of contemporary poetry. -- Jonis Agee, author of Strange Angels
The language in these poems...Tough country. Tough people. And Reese treats them, himself included, with tough compassion. -- Willam Kloefkorn, Nebraska State Poet
The language in these poems...Tough country. Tough people. And Reese treats them, himself included, with tough compassion. -- Willam Kloefkorn, Nebraska State Poet
About the Author
Jim Reese is a writer, photographer and editor who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is cofounder of and Imagining Editor for Logan House Press.
Reese's poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies: Nebraska Life, Nebraska Territory, Morpo Review, Plains Song Review (University of Nebraska Press), Platte Valley Review, Poetry Motel, in his first book, As Worthless As Tits On A Boar (Cacthouse Publishing 1995), and elsewhere.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love Poems to Nebraska,
By Christine Pappas (Ada, Oklahoma) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham (Paperback)
I've been wrestling with Jim Reese and his poems since I was collecting material for the first volume of Plains Song Review in 1999. His poems and stories were gritty and crazy, showing a side of rural life that people oftentimes aren't sober enough to write about. Reese's poems in "Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham" follow in that same tradition.Reese writes from a sure-footed point of view, taking the reader right into the heart of the scene or conversation without much unnecessary or cluttering set-up. That's the case with the title poem. The first-person narrator finds himself at a bar watching a woman drink a bloody beer. She says, "Wedding cake and funeral ham are my two favorite kinds of food . . . . I'm serious. Think about it." He continues, "So I thought about it. / And she made all the sense in the world." These bits of cryptic dialog are as inscrutable as epigrams, but also very cool in a Jack Kerouac kind of way. We square readers are given glimpses into a cool but desperate world; we wouldn't want to live there, but it's a nice place to visit. I jotted down some of the words that Reese repeats throughout the book: hardpan, torn, beer, man. His Nebraska is a rough place. Many of Reese's poems are about seeking something more. The farmhands and other toilers work hard, but it's clear to me that their goal is not just financial success. Reese's Westerners play fierce games of Euchre and jockey their tractors from dawn til dusk not just out of boredom or duty but because in a grim kind of way, they like their lives and the tasks set down before them. Reese is almost romantic in the way he shows them reveling in hard work and hard play. To borrow a line from "Backstage Pass: Interviewing Mustang Dick, Reese writes, "It's not just the money we're after anymore. / Just one more dance on a bright light shine." It's not surprising that Jim has written a set of unconventional love poems to Nebraska. He grew up in Omaha and received his bachelor's in journalism from Wayne State College. After completing a master's in English from UNO, he began a Ph.D. in creative writing at UNL. His poetry and fiction has appeared in many publications, and he serves as "imagining editor" at Logan House Press. His new chapbook "The Jive" is forthcoming from Omaha's Morpho Press.
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