What I Learned at the War
80 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:30 Mar 2016
ISBN:9780991074297
"Jeanetta Calhoun Mish speaks from the body, the core, and her own earth. Rarely will you find a collection more honest, more true, than this."--Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity
In her third poetry collection Jeanetta Calhoun Mish sends war dispatches from home. She brings her unique perspective as a rural working-class Oklahoman, a descendant of defeated Southern supporters in the Civil War, and a first-generation college student seeking a new expressive life to writings that range from blank-verse ode to ghazal and flash memoir to narrative free verse.
There's a never-misty nostalgia and sometimes hard edge to these poems of a rough childhood, and an homage to the equally rough environs of Oklahoma. It's the sure hand of the writer that keeps you reading, the propulsive sense of a life happened, lived and recorded, with as much candor and skill as the best poetry offers us'--Rusty Barnes, author of Reckoning
The power in these poems pitches, confessional and kindred like a puck along some pocked seam of red dirt clodded sanity. Grief-drenched, malady-reamed, and clumped up in some rancorous home front fault line ceremoniously split wide open, what proves revelatory, beyond Mish's poetic prowess, is her delivery of synchronicity in place and time--a sweet, sweet surrender.'--Allison Adelle Hedge Coke author of Streaming
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is the founding editor of Mongrel Empire Press and the director of the Red Earth MFA in Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma City University.
