Straight Ahead

American poetry of the Washington State steppe and scrublands.Red Shuttleworth's Straight Ahead shows readers a crisply-drawn textual landscape of the scablands of Eastern Washington. This is a wounded land pocked with volcanic rock, coyotes, and "plow-ripped / floury soil" that, like the mythic Old West, "declines and crumbles / to blue rock suburban driveway gravel" and "double-wide farmhouses." In these stark and masterfully-wrought scenes-most crafted in chiseled tanka-like five-line poems-we get a glimpse into this microcosm of America through Shuttleworth's astute, terse, and always human observations. In Straight Ahead we hear the twenty-first century lament of the exile in the Western wilderness.- Barbara Brinson Curiel, author, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, winner of the 2012 Philip Levine Prize