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AMERICAN LONELINESS

AMERICAN LONELINESS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9991994-7-3

Pub Date: Apr. 2019

Pages: 102


By Roy Bentley


American Loneliness is peopled with the famous and the not-so-famous, tenanted by the Wright Brothers and Nettie Potter Bentley, Joseph Kennedy and James Brown and Jay Gatsby. America, as presented, bests brave women and men alike: “My mother is comfortable with fury. She accepts it. / Like she accepted the contents of the pockets of her / dead brothers, miscellanea handed her in a morgue. / She is a woman who does not defer readily to men.” Roy Bentley shows us the world as a kind of Wright Flyer soaring above an Ohio field, the hoped-for miracle we let be enough for now.


    “Our review has been proud to publish more poems by Roy Bentley than any other poet in recent memory. His are poems which ignite curiosity, poems which both disturb and console, fully comprehensible, though challenging without sacrifice to quasar-like intelligence. Here is a volume with plenty of doors and windows to invite the reader inside. In American Loneliness, we find Mr. Bentley a fearless explorer of human natures. These verses are a gift and replete with surprises, page after page. Among America’s most gifted storytellers. A poet’s poet and, equally admirable, a readers’ poet. A poet who gets it all right. And no false moves.”

    —Robert Nazarene, founding editor & publisher, The American Journal of Poetry


    Roy Bentley is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City (University of Arkansas Press), a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press), which won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. Other books include The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press), which was the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, Any One Man (Bottom Dog Press), and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama Press), which won the University of Alabama Press Poetry Series. He has received fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council, and the NEA.

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