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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The Americans



"The Americans pledges its allegiance to dirt. And to laptops. And to swimming pools, the Kennedys, a flower in a lapel, plastic stars hanging from the ceiling of a child’s room, churning locusts, a jar of blood, a gleam of sun on the wing of a plane. His poems swarm with life. They also ask an unanswerable question: What does it mean to be an American? Restless against the borders we build—between countries, between each other—Roderick roams from place to place in order to dig into the messy, political, idealistic and ultimately inexplicable idea of American-ness. His rangy, inquisitive lyrics stitch together a patchwork flag, which he stakes alongside all the noise of our construction, our obsessive building and making, while he imagines the fate of a nation built on desire." (davidroderick.net)

The Americans is a compelling meditation on the ways we go about our lives at this cultural moment, often unmoored from the facts of history though we drift along its shores. Part complicated love letter to suburbia, these poems demand that we consider not only what we are drawn to but also what we fail to see, how the apocryphal feeds our cultural amnesia. The poet asks: Must nostalgia/walk like a prince through all our rooms?  This lovely collection shows us a way to confront that question within ourselves.” (Natasha Trethewey, Former U.S. Poet Laurette

“Like Robert Frank in his great photo essay of the same name, Roderick has some news for us: not only do we not know where we’ve come from, we don’t know where we are. With care and a restorative watchfulness, he has made terrific poetry out of our drifting in the fog.” (David Rivard, American Poet)

“The mindfulness and torque of this beautiful collection may be judged by the double drift of its epigraph: Nous sommes tous Américains. Words of solidarity, words of aspiration, words (too often) of chagrin or shame. De Toqueville to Moose Lodge to Trail of Tears: the whole rich mix of it is here, in poems exquisitely conceived and rendered.” (Linda Gregerson, Professor of English and Literature at The University of Michigan, American Poet)

“It’s sort of remarkable the way David Roderick makes such gorgeous music of the deep and abiding loneliness of which our lives—and our nations and dreams—sometimes, often, are made. It’s the music, the beauty, after all, that’s balm to all this sorrow. The Americans reminds me of this.” (Ross Gay, Creative Writing Professor at Indiana University Bloomington, American Poet)



David Roderick teaches creative writing and poetry in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

All I Have in This World

http://uncg.worldcat.org/oclc/859168670
"Part empathetic portrait of troubled souls and part Springsteenian ode to the promise and heartbreak of the highway... told with... emotional complexity and subtlety.”
(The New York Times)


“Two strangers meet on a windswept car lot in West Texas. Marcus is fleeing the disastrous fallout of chasing a lifelong dream; Maria is returning to the hometown she fled years ago, to make amends. They begin to argue over the car that they both desperately want—a low-slung sky-blue twenty-year-old Buick Electra.

The car, too, has seen its share of mistakes and failures. Every dent and seam has witnessed pivotal moments in the lives of others, from the boy who assembled it at the Cleveland factory to all the owners who were to follow: a God-fearing man who sells it when he sees a sexy girl sprawled across it; a doctor who can’t dissociate it from his son’s fate; and a rancher’s wife who’d much rather live without it for all the history it carries.


Marcus and Maria, after knowing each other for less than an hour, decide to buy the old car together. And as this surprising novel follows the rocky paths of the Electra and its owners—both past and present—these two lost souls form an unexpected alliance.
All I Have in This World is a tender novel about our desire to reconcile past mistakes, and the ways we must learn to forgive others, and perhaps even ourselves, if we are ever to move on.” (Algonquin)

“But what makes "All I Have in this World" memorable is this: While any number of disasters can (and do) take place along the way, and while some are heartbreaking, the watershed moments happen not with sadness or blood or pain, but with cascades of laughter. It's through moments of unabashed humor, when Marcus and Maria let go and laugh, that his characters finally, and completely, connect.


Which feels a lot like real life." (
The Denver Post)

“Pre-literate children, it’s told, favor above all else the following narrative: a person (princess, stuffed toy, Matchbox car), wandering the dark woods alone, meets The True Friend (dinosaur, dwarf, dog), and is, whew, rescued. The End. Michael Parker’s All I Have in this World performs a deeply satisfying, non-fantastical yet still magical, hard-won, grown-up version of that child’s confounding and abiding tale. This is a very funny, very moving novel about being lost and then found, about that rarest gift shared sensibility, and about being saved, and surprised, by the arrival of The True Friend. I love this book.”
(Antonya Nelson)