“Jim Reese … He’s our Mark Twain of this century … Jim writes about the everyday experience, and he, in my view, is therefore America’s poet.”
—Grace Cavalieri, from the Poet and the Poem at the Library of Congress
“We call it the heartland but we seldom drop by for a visit. Jim Reese catches the dying fire of the small town wasteland that staggers on with meth, desire, and neglect. These loving poems open the door to the real little house on the prairie. Time to step inside and finally have one honest moment with the forgotten center of our people.”
— Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields
Dancing Room Only
Dancing Room Only is a wild romp into the forgotten center of our people. With his signature rollicking style, a keen sense of humor, and an acute ear for dialect and voice, Reese archives the sinners and saints that haunt the Midwest and beyond. Author Kent Meyers writes of Reese's work: "In these poems, ordinary life with its children and neighbors crackles like a mirage, and shifts and opens, and we find we've been all along in San Quentin prison. What is it we just saw?—a five-year-old child swinging on the monkey bars, or a tattooed convict, crying? Reese's eye is the eye of a father, and he finds his world both alien and comforting. These are poems of praise and poems of warning, infused with love and latent violence. Reese makes us feel the threat throbbing inside the song." In Dancing Room Only: New and Selected Poems Reese is a well-traveled troubadour with Midwestern sensibility, and as the author of three widely-praised books of poetry, he knows how to blow our hearts sideways.
Other Books by Jim Reese
Bone Chalk
BONE CHALK by Jim Reese (Stephen F. Austin State U. Press, November 2019) Ride shotgun down the back-roads of the Great Plains as Reese becomes… Read More
Really Happy
Everything about Really Happy, Jim Reese’s third full-length collection of poetry, is ordinary – focused on life all around us. But out of this ordinary… Read More
ghost on 3rd
New York Quarterly Books 2010 Jim Reese’s newest collection, ghost on 3rd is riddled with love, latent violence, humor, and prison life. Critics who said… Read More
