Thomas Hubbard reviews Jed Myers' "Watching the Perseids"

My stepfather wept often during Mum’s last year. Fear and shock shone from way back in her eyes, behind the blank stare. Her knowledge of who and where she was had already left. Dementia had stolen her brain, and after a final year of total helplessness, she passed — Mom was gone and it was finished. Dementia took her away from us, then killed her, and her long dying deeply scarred both my stepfather and myself.

If only Jed Myers’ book, Watching the Perseids, could have come fifteen years ago, the pain could have been far more bearable.

book reviewsSarah SalcedoJune 25, 2016thomas hubbard, Watching the Perseids, jed myers, book reviews

Thomas Hubbard reviews Jeanetta C. Mish's "What I Learned at the War"

As a child who spent countless days in company of a river — swimming, catching crawdads, fishing, trapping muskrats, hunting rabbits — I learned how to cut small, tinder-dry grapevine twigs and smoke them like cigarettes, exhaling the mild smoke to drive away clouds of river gnats. And so when I opened Jeanetta Calhoun Mish’s What I Learned at the War for the first time and read the lede stanza of her “Pastoral for My Brother,” I was immediately hooked. She wrote,

Today, I remember
prowling the woods with you
smashing wild grapes
into our haunted mouths,
smoking the vines.

Reading on, I discovered a writer whose work evokes the America that birthed “new” southerners, urban mixed-blood NDNs, midwest greasers, and the legions of lost travelers who, like Kerouac in the fifties, cross the continent endlessly, searching for their lives. This collection of poems displays a distinctive attitude, established most succinctly in the poem, “Sometimes there was an armistice.”

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