I : America votes for the talking machine -- Dear corporation -- Horizontal tuxedo -- Deerfield crossing -- Salt & Pepper Diner -- Thunderbird Inn -- In the arms of a peachleaf willow off I-55 -- Songs build little rooms in time -- Leftovers -- I hummed her address until it existed in front of me -- Richard and I split the last of it -- II : Candlelight Motel -- Stardust Bowl -- Milk tooth -- Server appreciation day -- Coffin rehearsal -- Wilson Park -- In the tunnel -- Rumor of a warrant -- Round robin -- Elegy for the son of my future stepfather -- Bring a shovel to the silo, the X is north ten steps -- Winfield township -- Water scattering -- Caution: doors closing -- Yard work -- With crayons and construction paper -- Out of picture in the city of Niceville -- III : Dreamland -- The anarchist cookbook -- Air traffic -- Your collapse tastes just like mine -- Lemon windows -- It is not my birthday -- L stop -- The palace -- Wednesday before last -- The routine -- The bus is late again -- The birthplace of barbed wire -- Candlestick Park -- Signal transfer malfunction -- Petroleum jelly corset -- The backwash of the dead -- A half glass -- Niceville -- IV : Panhandle -- Richard and I play with the dead -- Equine assisted therapy -- Leon County -- Vagrant prophecy -- Warning label -- When I first met Richard.
Summary:
"THUNDERBIRD INN chronicles the drug-addled misadventures of a man and his friend, Richard, on a transcontinental bender that bottoms out in the Florida panhandle. Fueled by cheap booze and various powders, the duo loiters on the fringes of a decaying America. The poems in the collection are often casket-shaped, not unlike shoebox time capsules. Intimate spaces to die inside. Or live. Or snort horse tranquilizer. Which the narrator and Richard do often in neon lit parking lots. Do they commit a few small crimes? Sure. But there is a loving tenderness to their dysfunctional codependence. The collection itself is shaped by addiction and routine. This is less a tale of recovery and more of a doom spiral. Like a seedy motel, THUNDERBIRD INN is inhabited by outcasts and weirdos. Perhaps near an interstate, in valley stitched together with telephone wires."--Publisher's website
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.