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88 MAPS

88 MAPS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9908193-3-2

Pub Date: Fall 2015

Pages: 76


By Rob Carney


88 Maps is about the places, times, and wildness we should say yes to, and it’s about looking at all our real and figurative culs-de-sac and saying no. It’s a collection of praise songs, sonnets, prose poems, challenges to rampant development, narratives commemorating the last best places, and 21st century fables. That formal variety is combined with a singular vision and voice. The poems here can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s, the same way Tom Waits can’t be confused with some other singer, and gumbo—at least done right like it is in South Louisiana—doesn’t taste like just another soup.


Rob Carney’s 88 Maps lays a blueprint for navigating an American West replete with “invisible Stetsons” and immigration round-ups, Mountain Dew ad men and wolf hunts. In an age that would have us plug our inner worlds with power cords and impulse-buys, 88 Maps opens startling and bighearted pathways. Carney alerts us to languid truths, which angle against a national frame demanding that we live—or perhaps more accurately, livestream—in the extreme now. In a spirit of resistant joy, Rob Carney points us toward the riches of the internal landscape as well as the slow moving glories of day-to-day life. For this, we are deepened beyond measure.

—Diane Raptosh, author of American Amnesiac



    Rob Carney’s poems are strange machines, well-engineered but unfamiliar devices that bear both the inventor’s marks and the scars of use and misuse. They are suitable for combat and pillow. I admire the ways his poems are both tightly wound and unhinged, like toys that can’t be put back into the box and have evolved into companionable friends. The critical intelligence is keen in these poems, and so is the vaudevillian ear.

    —Ed Skoog, author of Mister Skylight and Rough Day


    Rob Carney earned a BA in English from Pacific Lutheran University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University, completing his PhD at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is a two-time winner of the Utah Book Award for Poetry and the author of three previous books and three chapbooks of poems, including Story Problems and Weather Report from Somondoco Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Redactions, River Styx, Sugar House Review, other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (Norton 2006). In 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University.

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