Customer Reviews

Wedding Cake and Funeral Ham

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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.