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TICKER

TICKER

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7333400-9-0

Pub Date: April 2021

Pages: 82


By Mark Neely


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020


Ticker contains almost everything—religion, calamity, politics, race, love, children, the Challenger disaster, Taco Bell, Oliver North, CVS, a main character named Bruce. In these poems, which are all the time moving between the cynical and the ecstatic, Neely never once turns his half-stare half-glare away from this strange, brutal country of ours.

—Jackson Holbert, Final Judge of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2020


    “Start with a hole in his chest.” In this concoction of what—fictional biography and alter ego?—that early line sets the stage for poems that don’t fill so much as explore the jagged spiritual hole that torments a man named Bruce. This relentless autopsy of a character is also an exploration of the hollowness of a culture that offers few means to achieve a sense of attachment or purpose, that leaves him largely on his own and feeling that there “are nothing but / desperate Bruces / all the way down.” The pressure of these poems creates a space where beauty and grace become craved, so when they show up, small moments and acts, such as when a blue heron stands “regally in the mouth / of a sewer pipe,” carry greater force and poignancy within Bruce’s world, and ours.

    —Bob Hicok, author of Red Rover Red Rover


    Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist grant, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Concrete Wolf Chapbook prize for Four of a Kind. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and a senior editor at River Teeth: a Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.

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